I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of MediaWiki 1.38.0-rc.0, the first release candidate for 1.38.0. Download links are at the end of the e-mail. The tag has been signed and pushed to Git.

This is not a final release, and should not be used for production websites. Known issues are tracked in Phabricator on the release workboard [1]. As with every release of MediaWiki, a large number of changes have landed in the last six months (over 1500 commits since 1.37.0 was cut), and you should read over the preliminary release notes as part of assuring yourself of areas that may have issues with your configuration, your skins, and/or your extensions.

As always, please try out the release candidate in a test environment and do report any issues that you discover. Please use the #MW-1.38-Release [2] tag in Phabricator when reporting issues specific to this release, to make sure that we find them as quickly as possible.

It is expected that MediaWiki 1.38 will become final in May 2022, though the date may slip if blockers are identified.

Preliminary release notes:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/+/REL1_38/RELEASE-NOTES-1.38
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.38

Open Bugs:
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mw-1.38-release/

Bug report form:
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?tags=MW-1.38-Release

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Download:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-1.38.0-rc.0.tar.gz
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-1.38.0-rc.0.zip

Download without bundled extensions:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-core-1.38.0-rc.0.tar.gz
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-core-1.38.0-rc.0.zip

GPG signatures:
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-core-1.38.0-rc.0.tar.gz.sig
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-core-1.38.0-rc.0.zip.sig
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-1.38.0-rc.0.tar.gz.sig
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-1.38.0-rc.0.zip.sig

Public keys:
https://www.mediawiki.org/keys/keys.html