LDAP Authentication way past due

First I'd like to thank you guys for the Diaspora and all of the developer contributions. I have nothing but praise for the Diaspora Project, but LDAP authentication is way past due.

I drop by the IRC channel every once and a while and I ask about LDAP authentication and I am greeted with a bit of reticence each time. I was told by a developer that none of the developers have the environment so it's not really a priority.

I was also told that I should implement it myself as if LDAP it is of very little consequence...like LDAP was some special feature that only I had a use case for. I actually did implement LDAP on my private pod which is running till this day but the code can't be updated because it breaks it.

Why isn't LDAP auth on the roadmap for Diaspora? Mind you, I don't know ruby but I got my pod to authenticate via LDAP and grab the users picture from the directory also. I almost got it working again with 0.3.0.3 and I'll eventually succeed, it's a lot of for work something that frankly should already be there. I can't/won't open my pod up for registrations without LDAP authentication

Diaspora would be running in a lot of schools, companies and large user environments. Even Media Goblin has LDAP support via python-ldap; it's just what you expect. Diaspora adoption and code contributions would definitely sky rocket if ldap authentication were there.

At this late date in the project, why is it not implemented yet? Most importantly do you guys not think that LDAP authentication and third part authentication support is critical?

Thanks,

Bryan