Thread:Manual talk:Skin autodiscovery/Backport of MonoBook and Vector to 1.23/reply (5)

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 ;)