Requests for comment/Tarball maintenance

This page is a requests for comment regarding MediaWiki tarballs.

Background
The Wikimedia Foundation has historically maintained the MediaWiki tarballs. However, since the Wikimedia Foundation is not a user of the tarball, maintenance of the tarball should be moved outside of the Wikimedia Foundation and into the hands of a group of people who have an ongoing interest in its use. This was a discussed in June 2012, but now it is time to make it happen.

Maintenance
Mark Hershberger has volunteered to handle the grunt work of initial release cycle. Of course, if you are interested in helping out, let him know.

Versioning
To mark this transition, Mark is suggesting that the version known as 1.20 be released as tarball version 2.0. While major version bumps like this are sometimes seen as a major feature release, he points to Linux 3.0 as a precedent.

Release frequency
Building on the Foundation's frequent (bi-weekly) release cycle, branching from a WMF-tagged release for core MediaWiki seems reasonable. But how often should we release? Every six months? Every three months? Major version bumps every month (similar to Mozilla Firefox versioning)? Point releases every month and major versions every three months or so?

Long-term support
Mark has been working with several other developers (both MediaWiki contributors and MediaWiki packagers) to provide Ubuntu-like “Long term support” for version 1.19 of MediaWiki.

Testing
What sort of special testing considerations are there to ensure a good quality tarballs? Could we use the nightly tarball build to run some integration tests that ensure the bundled extensions work properly?

Other
Add other concerns here or post them to wikitech-l.