I realize that mediawiki-l is a good list for reporting bugs in mediawiki, however, this posting addresses organizational elements of the 1.7 release that I feel need to be taken seriously by the Wikimedia Foundation and some changes made in your processes. The statements that follow are the result of my 20+ years experience as a 1) CEO of high tech companies 2) Chief Scientist of high tech companies 3) Wikipedia developer 4) Wikigadugi Language Project leader. Wikimedia can take or leave the comments -- they are for your benefit and consideration. <WP:SOAP> 1. Great that MediaWiki 1.7.1 is released. 2. Has Dependencies on PHP 5.0.0 (5.1.4). php 5 is a bug infested experimental release which does not have consistent installs on the commerical Linux distributions, including Red Hat ES 4, Suse 10, etc, crashes on apache, is poorly documented, and has a slew of defects, is difficult to install and configure. 3. Wikitext and MediaWiki has no dependencies for "wikitext" markup on php versions, so requiring php upgrades is unnecessary and thoughtless, and should be stopped. When you allow the developers of a technology to operate in a vacuum without accountability to customers and end users, the projects get driven by the community ego and not end goals to promote the technology to the public. 4. The biggest failure of community driven programs and open source is a lack of accountablity to end users and customers. What should happen in the future: 1. MediaWiki needs to post releases against commercial Linux distros and not a "roll your own" with a patchwork of patches and fixes. As it stands, MediaWiki 1.7.1 is not installable or usable on RedHat ES4 or FC5 without major patching and recompiling -- steps outside the skills of most folks who need to use Wikipedia content. 2. Wikimedia needs to enforce MediaWiki releases to allow seamless importing and use of XML dumps and content. My 2 cents. I spend currently about 40% of my time getting around MediaWiki problems with Wikipedia XML dumps, and 60% of my time actually working on Native language translations. The Uto-Aztecan language is being added at present as the Ute and Unita tribes have joined the WikiGadugi project. It would be nice if the MediaWiki folks would give more thought to ensuring their software works properly before posting releases, and the Wikimedia Foundation needs to enforce compatibilty between its published XML dumps and make certain they work properly with released MediaWiki versions. As it stands, the current setup almost appears anti-competitive by design to prevent folks from creating Wiki's of Wikipedia content (though I do not believe this is intentional on the part of Wikimedia). The "we are community driven" excuse only works if the community is also the customer and end consumer of Wikipedia content, which it is not. Anything we can do to make all of our jobs easier and more pleasant is appreciated. </WP:SOAP> Jeff