Sumana: we can revisit that once the project's complete. ;-)
Daniel: It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of git (let alone gerrit, which won't even _load_ when using IE9's default rendering mode), but you almost convinced me there. For now, I think we'll stick with SVN because it's what I and Lewis are familiar with; of course, I hope that the project matures so that one day I won't be needed at all.
Platonides: I don't deny what you're saying at all...but in all honesty I pretty much lost the passion for contributing code after the -- rather sudden -- transition to git, because it overcomplicated what was once a simple and working workflow. Yes, it's horribly selfish for me to say this, but then again, most MediaWiki developers are familiar with SVN and I want to be able to contribute, too.
I find the addition of MediaWiki 1.18.1 in r5 quite confusing
What's confusing about it? The official wikiHow codebase (as in the codebase powering wikihow.com) is based on 1.12 and we want to ditch it altogether and find better approaches than over 9000 core hacks, which is why we chose to use the most recent stable edition of MediaWiki, which is 1.18.1, as the basis for the new and improved wH codebase.
Currently, diff -ur wikihow-src wikihow-read-only/wikiHow/ contains lots
of unrelated changes.
How is one expected to make sense of it?
Are you trying to diff the official version(s) against ours? If so, that probably explains why you're seeing a lot of unrelated stuff. We're keeping official releases around so that people have an interface for viewing changes between (any) given weekly code releases. The changes we've made to wikiHow extensions, let alone the changes we _plan_ to make, are so big that diffs between the official releases and our versions are basically useless. Greg: Recruiting more people, participating in code review, testing code, and of course, writing code are just some of the ways to help out! I've tried to get some non-technical people interested (with very little success so far...) as there are plenty of tasks for newbies (such as updating indentation to use tabs instead of spaces and whatnot) to do, let alone for experienced programmers, such as yourself. Ping me or Lewis somewhere if you want commit access -- we'd be thrilled to have you onboard!
Having more info about the project on MW.org, especially in the context of WikiProject Extensions, would be splendid -- as people are likelier to read such more official (so to say) pages than my user subpages. ;-)
Thanks and regards, -- Jack Phoenix MediaWiki developer