this is a discussion happening on wikitech-l at the moment. I think this is also of interest to all the mediawiki users out there ;) Please share your thoughts!
I manage two installations of Mediawiki currently. One of which is on a shared hosting for which I don't have shell access, and the other is on a physical server that I have root access to.
I do plan on switching the shared hosting to a VPS at some point though. Regardless of the route taken, I think that support for the tarball should remain. This is the way that a lot of folks know how to set up web-based software.
And if you guys go the apt-get package route, please make sure that the packages are actually well put together. I've seen some really awful packages for web-based software before, stuff where you were better off just getting the tarball and doing it yourself. I have every bit of faith that the folks in charge of making the packages will do a good job, I just mention it because it has been a problem in the past for me with other software.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott