Gentoo Abandons WordPress in Portage

Posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007, at 10:43 am, and filed under Raw Technology. Note: Hypertext links in the printed form of this document are marked with a superscript "L" plus a number. The number corresponds to the list of web addresses at the bottom of the document.

I don’t think this has been widely announced, but while waiting for an update to Gentoo’s portage entry for WordPress to cover the latest security and bug fixes, I discovered in the comments of a bug in Gentoo’s bugzilla database that they are making no effort to support WordPress on Gentoo. I think this is really a poor move on Gentoo’s part. As one of the bug commenters noted, “Wordpress is, in general, a good product with an extremely active user community and good upstream maintenance.” ¹

A GLSA was issued for WordPress vulnerabilities in March — problems that have since been fixed — with this ‘resolution’:

Due to the numerous recently discovered vulnerabilities in WordPress, this package has been masked in the portage tree. All WordPress users are advised to unmerge it.

Now I’ll admit that I should not be expecting updates to packages that have been hard masked, but really — is this any way to treat the world’s most popular blogging software? In any case, I’ve abandoned Gentoo’s ebuild for WordPress and have reverted to the Subversion method for updating a WordPress installation. So here is a heads-up to do something similar should you find yourself in the same situation.

[20070812T2046 update: The portage keepers bumped the version of Wordpress to 2.2.2 in Portage yesterday.]