The Gadget Doctor wrote:
I was wondering if there is a recognized way for people who mod skins to keep up to date or if this kind of thing is just a right royal pain in the ass?
This information is readily available from the version control system. MediaWiki uses Subversion. For example, the command to see the differences between 1.12 and 1.13 MonoBook.php is (bash syntax):
svn diff http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/%7BREL1_12_0,REL1_13_0%7D/ph...
If you are using Subversion to manage your code, you can import these changes directly into your skin (if it hadn't diverged much), by changing 'diff' to 'merge', and adding your skin file name to the end of the command.
You can also save the output from 'svn diff' into a file and apply with the 'patch' command.
In both cases, conflicts may happen and you may need to manually fix them.