How to find a "good" server distro

[Collins Richey]

In my case "good" has a rather restricted meaning.

1. Solid, secure, etc.
2. Capable of running latest PHP, MySQL (yes I know this is despised
by many list members) without contortions.

The situation at work is this. We are running RHEL5/CentOS5, but
developers for some of the websites have a need for PHP5.3. Of course
this is not available from RedHat. I managed to track down PHP5.3 rpms
designed for RHEL5/CentOS5 and the required MySQL, but some of the PHP
stuff has other dependencies that are difficult to resolve. I was
unable to find a particular perl-DBD module that will fit. And the
php-pdo module has a SQLITE dependancy that appears to be impossible
to resolve. RH in their great wisdom has a further downlevel PHP5.0
but very uplevel SQLITE3, and PHP5.3 (per reported bugs) will only
work with SQLITE2 or earlier.And, of course, RH has other dependencies
that require SQLIT3. Catch 22.

As a side note, even Debian unstable isn't offering PHP5.3 yet.

Sigh. The ideal "good" distro would be one which has a solid core with
security updates, but offers upgraded packages for the LAMP stuff.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.