2009/7/24 Dan Collins en.wp.st47@gmail.com:
I'm tempted to say that it's got to be entirely a bug with the redhat package. Since I don't have such a machine to test it on, I'm afraid I can't be of much help, except to say that downloading the source yourself should work as a long term solution, as you already have done.
I'm pretty sure this is what's happening.
The Red Hat package has, stupidly, chosen to set $wgArticlePath = "/$1"; and add rewrite rules accordingly. The people in #mediawiki strongly discourage this, because it causes all kinds of annoying bugs; this is one of them. Because the rewrite rules are not aware of the API's existence, they will interpret /api.php as a URL to an article, and rewrite it to /index.php?title=api.php . It does not attempt to rewrite this again, because anything starting with /index.php is exempt from this rule.
There are two solutions. The quick and dirty one is to add another exception for api.php in the Apache rewrite rules similar to the one for index.php . The proper one is to use non-overlapping, different paths for the virtual and real paths, which is what the documentation on short URLs encourages as well. In short, Red Hat's setup has /Page_name being rewritten to /index.php?title=Page_name ; instead, /wiki/Page_name should be rewritten to /w/index.php?title=Page_name .
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)