It has been requested for quite a while to have the Wikimedia site configuration for MediaWiki in a public version control system [1]. This is now done, and can be viewed using gitweb [2].
This essentially means you can do your own shell requests (mostly). This is the same as with MediaWiki and the Operations Puppet repos, anyone with an account can push changes to these repositories for review. When reviewed and merged, they can be pulled onto site and deployed.
No history of these files have been imported.
There are probably a few more configuration files that are in the common directory subtree that can be made public in the near future - for now, the important ones (for most people), e.g. CommonSettings.php and InitialiseSettings.php are there.
Sam
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17517
[2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations/mediawiki-config.git