It doesn't get backported fixes in a timely manner (best I can tell)

Even if this is not true, it still means that we need an extra backporting step, and the packaging is out of date until that happens (it's not mentioned on mw.org, for one)

mediawiki/debian follows the LTS tarball releases, and is up to date in that regard. I do want to provide stable releases (T156543) but it's more work than I have time for right now. I'm not sure putting this in core would be that welcome given all of the extra tags and branches it would bring along too. There would be also the question of which distro would core default to - Debian unstable? stable? Some Ubuntu version? They generally all have slight packaging differences.

If you're using https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/search/ it won't appear in search results :-)

In T185983#3930920, @Legoktm wrote:

mediawiki/debian follows the LTS tarball releases, and is up to date in that regard. I do want to provide stable releases (T156543) but it's more work than I have time for right now. I'm not sure putting this in core would be that welcome given all of the extra tags and branches it would bring along too. There would be also the question of which distro would core default to - Debian unstable? stable? Some Ubuntu version? They generally all have slight packaging differences.

Hmmm, fair.

If you're using https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/search/ it won't appear in search results :-)

This is true. I'm usually using my local machine (I have all repos cloned), but github is used by many.

(Sidebar, without getting off track: could we add operations/mw-config, operations/puppet and operations/dns to codesearch? That's my biggest blocker from regular use right now <3)