(Sorry for late reply, I was traveling and only had scarce Internet connection.)
On Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:25:06 +0200, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
"The timestamp would be updated manually by whoever is making those changes" -- could we introduce some clever automation to propose an update every time a relevant file is touched or a particular automated test breaks? Otherwise we have to thoroughly educate authors and reviewers to always update this, which sounds tedious.
I'm afraid that not really. These issues aren't really detectable in any way other than just pushing the code to a test wiki and seeing if the layout looks good, and the transitive nature of the only makes it harder to automate the checking. Maybe the Selenium tests could be useful here, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also, there is approximately one person wanting to make such changes right now (myself), and approximately five other people willing to review any skin changes (all of them already knowledgeable about the matter or able to figure it out by themselves), so this isn't really an issue for the review process, either.