Git checkout for submodules not working for WordPress

Question

I have WordPress as a git submodule and it is checked out at tag 3.8.1.

I want to get the latest version of WordPress which is 3.8.2.

I have done the following structure:

/html
    /wp - submodule to WordPress

I then run the following commands:

$ cd wp
$ git checkout 3.8.2
Previous HEAD position was 22bb602... Tag 3.8.1
HEAD is now at 5577e02... Tag 3.8.2

However when I go and check the WordPress dashboard it still tells me that I still need to update to 3.8.2.

Answer 1

This was a complete red herring. The git checkout 3.8.2 was working. But I hadn't properly checked the file changes and there's no such indication that the files have been updated as when you do a git pull.

However the WordPress dashboard was thinking that I was not on the latest version because I am using a dutch translated version of WordPress.

So in the wp-config.php I have define( 'WPLANG', 'nl_NL' );

This then requires that you are using the nl-NL installation of WordPress from e.g. https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/nl_NL/wordpress-3.8.2.zip

However because I am using the github version of WordPress, that only has the US English version of WordPress. Its a hack, but to fix the problem I just edited the wp-includes/version.php file, to include the following line at the bottom, which is the only file that differs in the WordPress core for the translated version:

$wp_local_package = 'nl_NL';

Then WordPress is happy that you have the latest version.

Then you have to pull in the translation files.

Answer 2

3.8.2 is actually a tag, not a branch. It points to a specific commit. Pulling makes no sense there.

If you want to stay up-to-date with the 3.8 version use the branch 3.8-branch.

$ git checkout 3.8-branch
$ git pull