I see the post on bugzilla, but to be honest I
don't know what is meant by 'Patch for trunk'. I see that there's a a
bit of code that was added to SkinTemplate.php; does this code fix the external link
problem?
Yes it does. I did it for the trunk version (development is done there).
Backporting to 1.17 or a older version should be easy because the patch
is not big at all.
But keep in mind that the patch was not accepted. Maybe we should wait a
bit before discussing about backporting or other things.