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past we (MediaWiki hackers) have discouraged people from using packages provided by Linux distributions since they were out of date or worked sub-optimally.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 While this may have been true, it has left a huge number of MediaWiki installations out-of-date and not likely to be upgraded soon or at all.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 m...@wikimedia.org -- Ubuntu-motu mailing list Ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-motu