On 20/02/14 21:32, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
It's worth noting that WMF branches also include temporary hacks to keep current JS/CSS and cached HTML output compatible (for at least 30 days), while release branches never contain them (and thus require HTML caches to be purged during the upgrade process).
This usually only affects changes to the Vector skin which is not the default there (I'm not sure if it's even available), but nevertheless wikiHow might prefer one of these depending on how their caching layer is set up.
If wikiHow's setup is sufficiently different, it might be worth considering making their own branches from the master - test and fix things from what was the current master, deploy it, move the test up to the new master, and repeat. This would do the same as with the wmf branches to avoid a lot of the usual difficulty involved in upgrading, but could perhaps also be tailored to be more specific to the systems wikiHow uses.
It would require pretty consistent maintenance of their own, but it could be worth it.
-I