Topic on Manual talk:Skin autodiscovery

Due to fixing bugzilla:70672 and the fact that bugzilla:71621 is stuck in some kind of meta talk and will most probably end up as WONTFIX users now have to create custom skins from MonoBook and/or Vector to have e.g. a decent login and preferences page.

However if you do this for MW 1.23 (LTS) you end up with the autodiscovery warning kinda spamming your server log. The new versions of MonoBook and Vector currently only seem to be available for MW 1.24+. Thus it will be nice to have these backported for MW 1.23 to avoid these continuous warnings and probably to have as skin that will not go berserk directly at the next upgrade. This will be cool to have.

If the current extensions created for MW 1.24 are also usable with MW 1.23 when tagging them accordingly will be great.

Hmm... probably a bug should be filed for this?

Yeah the MonoBook and Vector skin extensions definitively do not work with MW 1.23. So I take all your answers as a no for any backport effort.

The handling of custom compared to build-in skins in MediaWiki 1.23 is flawed for the reason you mentioned: MediaWiki complains that using autodiscovery would be deprecated while at the same time using autodiscovery itself. You will find me having said that this situation should be improved, however, according changes to fix this flaw have never been implemented.

In the meantime half a year has passed and MW 1.23 no longer is the latest release. MW 1.24 in contrast does come with fixed core skins, which do no longer cause autodiscovery warnings. What I personally did was to update my skin for 1.24 and update my installations.

For 1.23 the situation is, as I noted back then, as you now noted as well, bad, but I don't believe now, that MW 1.23 already is old, anyone will come up and fix this.

I doubt the release team will support backporting the refactoring of skin system from 1.23 to 1.24.; but if you strongly feel that the deprecation messages themselves are more harm than good, then you might want to file task about it on Phabricator (be sure to add the #Wiki-Release-Team project) – MW 1.23 is a long-term support release, so it might be worth it. Personally I still think the messages are useful, but I won't argue about it. :)

The "problem" with 1.23 is that it is an LTS release supported until 2017 and it will probably be a horror for regular MediaWiki users to migrate e.g. MonoBook derived custom skins not to use autodetection for this release. I guess it would have be done for MonoBook right away if it was easy.

I think the guide here is pretty good, and there were at least some people who successfully followed it and migrated their skins (some even improving the guide in the process <3).

The built-in skins' migration was delayed because:

• When 1.23 was being released, it wasn't yet clear what repository and directory structure we want, and it took a while to push these discussions through without angering too many people.
• They were too deeply integrated with MediaWiki; primarily Vector, which MediaWiki couldn't run without at the time, and I didn't want to only migrate some skins because then the thing would definitely get stuck half-done forever. Custom skins usually don't implement things like autoloader entries, localisation messages, hooks… The actual MonoBook cleanup commit, when all the dependencies were resolved, wasn't difficult: ec1ccf4367515dfeba5d5f8edb2dfca00b7505ac (Vector took several more messy commits, though).
• I was the only person doing this and I just wasn't able to pull three of four all-nighters right then to get it done in time ;)