The drawback is that installation becomes more complex.

As long as you don't care of the security benefits, not really. If you dump a tarball into /var/www, MediaWiki will be available as example.com/index.php. If we move the entry points into, say, a directory called w, it will be available as example.com/w/index.php. No configuration needed. It will be a thorough BC break for existing installations, of course.

OTOH anyone who cares much about security has probably set up MediaWiki via symlinks or whatever; moving the entry points makes that marginally more convenient, at most (you need slightly less symlinks, but you still need to deal with assets which is the more problematic part).

If we want to support convenient non-webroot installation, that would probably require some mechanism to copy assets from core and skins/extensions into the webroot, and also set up entry point redirects there.

In T180394#3757123, @Tgr wrote:

If we want to support convenient non-webroot installation, that would probably require some mechanism to copy assets from core and skins/extensions into the webroot, and also set up entry point redirects there.

Another option could be to just proxy the rest of the assets that aren't JS/CSS through load.php anyways so skins/extensions never need to be in the webroot themselves. (And then replace debug mode somehow)

Replacing debug mode needs to happen anyway :)

@Anomie This seems ready for an IRC discussion. Does that sound useful to you? And do you have a preferred time slot for the discussion?

I file this mainly because it kept getting mentioned but we didn't have a task for it. I'd be happy for someone else to actually push it forward.

@Anomie ok, i'll put it in "under discussion" for now