I had to do this for our family of multilanguage wikis. My solution was to write a Linux
shell script that accepts one parameter, the name of the site (e.g., BarbarasWiki), and:
1. Copies LocalSettings.php to a temp file (say, my-temp-file.php)
2. Appends site-specific settings (for BarbarasWiki or whatever) to my-temp-file.php
3. Invokes "cd /mywiki/maintenance && php update.php --aconf my-temp-file.php
$@"
Then I ran this for each site.
Maybe someday, MediaWiki will have built-in support of this kind for wiki families. Right
now you have to roll your own.
DanB
-----Original Message-----
while trying to update my wiki_family from 1.15.4 to 1.16.0, I see that
update.php tries to update my public schema, which contains no wiki.