[I posted this through the nntp interface, but I think my subscription attempt was wonky, and it never showed up. Hopefully this won't be a dupe.]

Since posting this, I've looked into it a bit more, and it looks like there is some nascent support for what I want with things like $wgStylePath, but it seems like there are still issues with stuff like mixing of skins/common in the same directory as custom skins, etc., so I think/hope the question is still worth asking. I'm still digging to see what it would take to completely separate out the local from svn stuff.

Chris

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: mediawiki source code directory layout and customization Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 14:00:11 -0700 From: Chris Hecker checker@d6.com Newsgroups: gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical

I did a bit of searching in the archive and didn't find anything on this topic, but I'm sure it's been discussed before, so my apologies if this is redundant.

Would it be possible and is there any interest in "slightly" reorganizing the source layout so that installation specific files are all in one directory hierarchy that's not versioned in the svn repository? In other words, currently the files one needs to modify to install and customize mediawiki are in a few different locations, sometimes discrete files in directories with existing version controlled files, sometimes new directories next to versioned core directories, etc. This makes it somewhat difficult to run version control on my local changes separately from the mediawiki changes.

To be concrete, files like LocalSettings.php and AdminSettings.php, and new skins with their BlahSkin.php in skins/ along with the others, and then their skins/blahskin css directory off that, and the README under svn in extensions/, and these types of things, and the fact that there are this many different places to put stuff, makes it difficult to integrate the official versioned mediawiki and my local stuff, especially with multiple local sites running the same core mediawiki but different local customizations.

Do people think it would be a good idea to reorganize to have a "local/" directory off the root that has AdminSettings.php and LocalSettings.php, and then local/extensions/ and local/skins/ that are also searched for extensions and skins in addition to the current ones? That way the local/ directory could use an svn:externals prop to come from somewhere else, or an svk view, or it could be a symlink, etc.

Is anybody else running into this issue?

Thanks, Chris