I have a handful of production servers running Centos. My application requires a fairly recent version of PHP (> 5.2, IIRC). The options currently available to Centos Users are:
- The official, mainstream centos5/redhat packages.
- Pros: Most stable, most secure, easy to install -- redhat regularly releases security updates and advisories.
- Cons: packages are old (5.1.6?)
- Third party repositories (like Remi Collet's repo)
- Pros: Bleeding-edge, easy to install
- Con: Unreliable -- we used to use the utterramblings repository... but the guy has been totally MIA for over a year now. I don't want to get left high and dry like that again.
- Con: Not as secure or stable
- Use the CentOS testing repository
- Pros: Pretty recent version, easy to install
- Cons: Unstable. They don't call it "testing" for nothing. Not ideal for a production server
- Build from source (php.net)
- Pros: Bleeding edge
- Cons: Labor intensive, insecure, unstable
Other options:
- Redhat offers the Redhat application stack which includes recent builds, but no centos equivalent exists.
- Is there any reason CentOS versions of these packages don't exist? The source must be available, right?
- The source has to be available, right? How hard would it be to build centos packages myself?
- Other linux distros
- Debian is comparable in stability to redhat, but offers old packages
- Ubuntu offers fresher, but less stable/secure packages
- Others?
So, in the end, my question is this: Is there a good source of stable, secure, regularly updated PHP packages or source out there (for ANY linux distro)? Where do you get your source/binaries from?