MediaWiki package maintainers: please join mediawiki-distributors

[Mark A. Hershberger]

Executive Summary:

Please join mediawiki-distributors
(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-distributors)
so that we can work more closely together to make a better, more secure
MediaWiki package.

Details:

Last week, one of the maintainers for Fedora's MediaWiki package
opened a bug about licensing issues with different parts of the MediaWiki
package (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/36747).

The problem has been addressed, but I'd like to use this opportunity to
start working more closely with MediaWiki packagers from all Linux
distribution packagers.  Daniel Zahn has been scanning existing MediaWiki
installations (http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/) and we've found an
incredible number of sites with old, probably insecure installations.

In the past we (MediaWiki hackers) have discouraged people from using
packages provided by Linux distributions since they were out of date or
worked sub-optimally.  We felt people who used packages were not getting
the most out of their MediaWiki installation.

While this may have been true, it has left a huge number of MediaWiki
installations out-of-date and not likely to be upgraded soon or at all.

To get around this problem, I'd like to start working more closely with
packagers of MediaWiki for different Linux distributions.  My hope is
that we can then ask people to install a MediaWiki package with their
package manager and be confident that it will remain (relatively)
secure.

I set up the mediawiki-distributors mailing list
(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-distributors)
for this coordination.  It should be This list should be very low
volume and be directly related to the issues of those who package and
distribute MediaWiki.  You should feel free to post about any problems
you come across packaging MediaWiki, but I'll try to keep all
discussion on-topic.

I'm interested in your thoughts.

-- 
Mark A. Hershberger
Bugmeister
Wikimedia Foundation
mah at wikimedia.org