a version hash that changes the URL every time the file is modified

We could work around this by dropping the version param whenever packageFiles and debug mode are used. Raw files in debug mode don't get a version param, so this would be making the behaviour match that.

In T235667#5580498, @Esanders wrote:

Raw files in debug mode don't get a version param [..]

Can you elaborate? I agree we should make breakpoints easy and sticky, but as I understand it, urls change with classic file modules and debug mode as well. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?debug=true loads https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/Echo/modules/api/mw.echo.api.NetworkHandler.js?6dc51, etc.

Hmm, not for me:

Interesting, that seems like a bug. Possibly configuration related.

I don't have a preference for whether these urls have version parameters. However, note that their current presence in debug mode is not due to some generic code applying there. Rather, it was intentionally added to solve the problem outlined in T90983: ResourceLoader debug urls should bypass cache when they change. If we remove these, we'll have to re-solve that in a different way.

In a nut shell:

• Static files from wgResourceBasePath are expected to have long-caching headers set at the web server level (depending on complexity of a dev setup, this is entirely optional, but it is something we do need to support in prod, in beta and when testing with MW-Vagrant with the Varnish module enabled).
• In production we have multiple versions deployed at once from a single docroot, which means we need to disambiguate which version the current URL is for in a way that doesn't vary by hostname (all /w/resources and /static urls are cached in Varnish with host-agnostic cache key) . This applies mainly to font files and SVG icons.
• Given raw debug files are served from the same directory, we need to cache-bust them, as well as to disambiguate. Using a content address/ hash param, solved both.

Moving to T235672. This task is just about source map support