I found pecl:svn wanted to ask me two questions about subversion, so I was able to let it sit there while I opened another terminal to look in the temp directory and find the log. So I finally figured out what its problem was.

I had $wgSMTP set up to talk to a remote exchange server, but password resets just weren’t working from the wiki. It turns out all I was missing was the ‘php-pear-Mail package’ (in fedora, for debian or other systems it may be a different package name). I started by checking any logs related to this problem… mail.php missing in UserMailer.php - dependency problem