App - User External

ThePatzen · March 18, 2026, 3:34pm

Hello everybody,

not sure if this is the right place for this…

Im just here for asking if somebody has the posibility to contact one of the Maintainers of GitHub - nextcloud/user_external: 👥 External user authentication methods like IMAP, SMB and FTP · GitHub

It seems this needs some merges to ensure Support for NC 33.

Im stuck at updating to a newer NC version as this app is not supported anymore in newer Releases….

Best Regards,

David

JimmyKater · March 18, 2026, 3:39pm

of course you can try here… but if they didn’t react on Fix NC 33.0.0 compatibility, deprecated execute() method was removed by michael-dev · Pull Request #282 · nextcloud/user_external · GitHub they hardly will do here since github is the place to discuss stuff like that

tflidd · March 18, 2026, 10:55pm

They are also looking for new maintainers:

github.com/nextcloud/user_external

Comment by AndyScherzinger - Make NC31 compatible.

master ← beanjammin:nc-31

Hi @andrewhotlab, yes I agree, but would do so for basically any app. Somebod…y or several people spent time on building something useful for themselves and others. So in any case it would be sad to see it vanish or degrade. Since the repository lives inside the Nextcloud Github organization the admins here can grant further developers access, so they could do changes to the code and potentially release a new version. This way no fork is needed and this would be the good case scenario since it prevents fragmentation and confusion. The apps get signed by the developer for security reasons (so you are somewhat sure about the origin/authenticity). So what would happen then is that the new maintainer gets a new key to sign _and_ requested via the app store takes over the ownership of the app in the app store to be able to do new releases of the app. So in short it would be a 3 step process: 1. Find people willing and wanting to maintain the app and take over the ownership here on Github 2. Provide the new maintainer with a key 3. Transfer the app ownership on the app store to the new maintainers So the above would be the high-level steps. The reasons we are typically very, very conservative with this is that for good reasons people take pride in their work and have a strong sense of ownership. So "taking away" ones ownership at least for the app-store/publishing part is quite an impactful action and has the potential for a lot of conflict with the original maintainers, should they ever come back and feel left out of the decision. I only know of 2 incidents where ownership got transferred and in both cases it took more than a year to get there. So yes, there is a way to resolve it, it is rarely used, hence relatively unknown. Something to get better at for sure while I still hope it isn't needed that often (hasn't been in the past) because I rather have a thriving community and ecosystem where this isn't needed. --- So I'll try again to get in touch with @violoncelloCH one more time. In any case since availability might still be an issue in terms of time that can be spent, looking for further community people to join the development and maintenance of the app makes sense I think. So I'll see to have a call to action on the forum anyways.

A few people contributed code with pull requests, but not sure if there was already someone stepping up to maintain the thing.

JimmyKater · March 19, 2026, 5:51am

@ThePatzen that’s a serious hint…