Linux Distributions vs PHP

The splintering of Linux distributions seems to be continuing!

This week, I have had requests for PHP versions 5.3 and 5.2 on both Red Hat EL 5 and CentOS 5 – though never distribution supports higher than 5.1.6 in the official repositories.

PHP 5.2 has been out quite a while. Ubuntu Hardy LTS has it and it is 2 years old. Ubuntu Lucid LTS is coming out in April has 5.3 by default. I bet Debian Lenny is at 5.2 or higher already. SUSE is at 5.3 (for version 11.x where X != 0)

“Why” seems to be the question of the day – why doesn’t RHEL do some updates to something people feel they ‘require’ for their PHP web applications? CentOS would then follow.

Even old/stodgy FreeBSD (my personal favorite) is all over the 5.2 camp for PHP since 6.x, and the *BSD people do not play the version of the day.

If I have to run Linux based systems, I choose Ubuntu. Not always the latest version but at least this distribution keeps up with customer wants (and sometimes…needs).