Thomas Haller commented on a discussion:
Historic reasons. NetworkManager (the core package) is both a GNOME and a freedesktop project. That is, we use gitlab.freedesktop.org but the mailinglist and https://download.gnome.org/sources/NetworkManager/ from GNOME. I guess the idea of this was that NetworkManager (core) is not only relevant for GNOME desktop and that freedesktop.org would the organization for fixing bug 1 and making year of Linux Desktop. I am too young for this :)
network-manager-applet, libnma and most (all?) VPN plugins are strictly GNOME projects.
This inconsistency doesn't really bother me and I would avoid investing the (substantial) work of moving projects around.
I don't know about NetworkManager-pptp. If PPTP is insecure and shouldn't be used, then that is the users (recommended) choice by not using NetworkManager-pptp. I don't think we need to enforce that by making it harder to use it. Also, I don't think people make the active choice to run a PPTP Linux hosted VPN services. Instead, it might be a company that requires the user to use it. At this point, the user still has the choice to not use PPTP and open an issue with that company. But if a user really really wants, I think we should try to make that possible (at least, as far as an implementation exists). Granted, the project saw very little activity in the past few years. That might mean nobody is using it (good) or it just works (also good). Hard to say which is the case, but again, I am fine with still having the project there. If you have more knowledge about PPTP, what would be good to have the README explain the problems and make good recommendations.