In the past couple of weeks I've been talking with Sam Reed (WMF's
current MediaWiki release manager) and Rob Laphiner (WMF's Platform
Engineering Director) about the future of MediaWiki tarballs.
I began this discussion after Rob expressed regret about the WMF's
ability to give tarball distribution the attention it deserves. Since
the WMF is focused on maintaining Wikipedia and its sister projects,
tarball distribution often loses among competing priorities.
The Foundation has made MediaWiki available for everyone and that's a
great thing. But Wikimedia's funding comes from donations as a result
of requests on Wikipedia, not from distribution of MediaWiki, so they
are rightly focused on their production cluster.
Other users of the MediaWiki software have different needs. For
instance, Citizendium, and Wikia and have both pegged their MediaWiki
installations at 1.16.5 for stability and made their own modifications
-- essentially forking the code. Forking is not ideal, but it is
understandable because there is no cooperation around individual
MediaWiki releases over the long term. With a third party to manage
MediaWiki releases and maintain long term support for selected releases,
cooperation between non-WMF users would be smoother.
To this start effort, I welcome interested collaborators from the
community of MediaWiki users outside of the WMF. With your help, we
will start making and maintaining MediaWiki releases based on the core
MediaWiki code without forking development.
I've been discussing this with some MediaWiki sites as well as setting
up a separate mailing list for packagers (such as Debian and RedHat
distributors) and discussing it there. So far the response has been
positive.
So now I'm asking you guys. Any interest?
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