I think this should follow suit of other USES providers such as python and support . (dot) releases syntax

Why is this needed? Can't this work just like Mk/Uses/python.mk?

I have tried to follow the syntax in mysql which looks way cleaner than what python is.

There are some ports which supports a wide range of ldap versions but in case the user wants to specifically ask for a more specific version rather than the DEFAULT one. python.mk is a mess.

^why is this needed globally?

^ is there a *nice* way? What does it do if no pkg is in the repo?

where is it even needed?

This can be ifed when the versions are only 25 and 26.

There was no reference of the usage of this variable even.

This should NOT be OpenLDAP version-dependent.

It was defined globally because it takes time for third party code to catch up with new API. Since it is there forever, we do not really know if any of APIs removed in OpenLDAP 2.4 is still in use, so if you make it conditional on version, please request an exp-run with OpenLDAP 2.4 as default (or maybe just remove OpenLDAP 2.4), or users trying to build with OpenLDAP 2.4 client may be broken.

This was used in SASL package and it's safe to remove.

Yes indeed.

cd net/openldap24-server && make patch && find work/openldap-2.4.59 -type f -exec grep LDAP_DEPRECATED {} \;
cd net/openldap25-server && make patch && find work/openldap-2.5.13 -type f -exec grep LDAP_DEPRECATED {} \;
cd net/openldap26-server && make patch && find work/openldap-2.6.3 -type f -exec grep LDAP_DEPRECATED {} \;

And I think I should revert the version clause mentioned here.