Since we seem to routinely have our deployment linger a bit behind trunk but still need to make updates on it, I've gone ahead and created a branch with out live versions of MediaWiki & extensions on it:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/wmf-deployment
Misc coders: please don't commit to it or we break you. :)
With Subversion 1.5 or later on the client, merging updates from trunk should be easier, as SVN now saves merge info into properties and can more intelligently figure out where you last left off. For instance to update the UsabilityInitiative extension to the current version from trunk:
cd extensions/UsabilityInitiative svn merge \ svn+ssh://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative svn commit
The theoretical workflow is: * Merge updates that need to go live into branches/wmf-deployment * Test it locally & on staging server (once we've got a nicer staging area set up) * Update deployment master: svn up * Poke live test on test.wikipedia.org * Deploy updates to all servers: scap
For the moment I've applied the various 'svn up' and manually merged live patches from our live deployment, with the exception of any _manually added_ files. There's a lot of cruft and I'm not sure yet which of the extra files are ancient one-offs and which we really need. :)
We'll want to test a fresh checkout on test.wikipedia for a bit before syncing live to all wikis.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)