A while back[1], I started a discussion about moving tarball maintenance out of the Foundation. I have spent a little time since then talking to Sam Reed about what is actually involved, but we're coming up on the 6 month mark since the last release and I need to start doing something if I'm actually going to follow through.
I've started https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Tarball_maintenance to help drive this. I would really like to get the next version of the tarball out the door by November (6 months from the last release in May).
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/61638