I got permission from Reuben Smith of wikihow and WMF release manager Greg Grossmeier to re-post this exchange.
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Reuben Smith of wikiHow asked: "We're having a hard time figuring out whether we should be basing our wikiHow code off Mediawiki's external releases (such as the latest 1.22.2), or off the branches that WMF uses for their internal infrastructure (latest looks to be wmf/1.23wmf14).
Do you have any thoughts of guidance on that? We're leaning towards moving to using the WMF internal branches, since we use MySQL as well, but I wanted to hear from different people about the drawbacks."
Greg Grossmeier responded:
"The quick answer is: Feel free to base it off of either. There shouldn't be any WMF-specific things in those wmfXX branches. If there is, it is a commit called something like "Commit of various WMF live hacks". That one commit can be safely reverted.
The wmfXX branches are made every week on Thursday morning (Pacific) before we deploy. As we get closer to the next release (1.23) the MediaWiki Release Managers (our outside contractors, Mark and Markus, not myself) will pick a wmfXX to call a Release Candidate.
Going with a 1.22.x would give you stability at the loss of getting fixes faster and it means a bigger upgrade task when 1.23 is out.
Summary: If you want to keep closer to WMF, pick a wmfXX branch (this assumes you'll follow at some pace behind WMF). If you don't want to be that bleeding edge, stick with 1.22.x.
Hope that helps,
Greg
PS: To learn more about our deploy cycle, see: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/One_week PPS: To see where we are at any given point, wrt MediaWiki, see: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_deplo..."