How to find a "good" server distro

[Michael Hipp]

Collins Richey wrote:
> 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.

I know nothing about PHP, on purpose. But could you just build it from source 
and install it somewhere it can't do any damage until perhaps Cent/RH release 
  rpms?

I have to do that with Python (and kin) at my hoster.

Michael