I'm not an OpenVPN developer per se -- other than a few trivial patches
-- but I should be able to comment.
First -- the requirements for what you want a VPN to do in a grid
environment are something which need to be specified. Since OpenVPN is
limited to either a 2-endpoint peer-to-peer model or a hub-and-spoke
model, it isn't necessarily well-suited to cases where a arbitrary
communications will need to be encrypted within a cloud.
Second, OpenVPN already provides a number of methods to interact with it
which are readily programmatically accessible. This includes the manual
page; OS-level signals; command-line and configuration file parameters;
etc. My experience is that these are more than adequate for controlling
the behavior which is presently available -- and that in cases where
these tools and in of themselves don't provide the desired level of
functionality, that building additional layers on top of the preexisting
interfaces (rather than building entirely new interfaces) is appropriate.
Could you document the exact functionality you wish to add, and the
business case for exposing that functionality as a native API?
