[Westwales] My Dilemma

[Dan Field]

I've been using Debian for a while now (few years) and I've always found 
it to be great for servers. However I'm having a bit of a downer at the 
moment. Let me explain the way my litle brain thinks:

1) Only ever use STABLE for production servers.
2) Always use debian packages rather than compiling from source. You  
either buy into the package management thing altogether or not at all.
3) Compiling deb src packages should only be done for the src package in 
stable (i.e. same version as the binary package), as you have no idea 
about obscure dependencies or interactions with other 
libraries/applications.

My dilemma is that I currently need a production webserver with Apache, 
MySQL and PHP. My project is bilingual, so I require UTF-8 support.

Debian Stable packages:

MySQL 3.23.49-8
Apache 1.3.26
PHP 4:4.1.2-6

Current Stable versions of the above:

MySQL  4.0.18 5.0.0 in ALPHA
Apache 1.3.30 and 2.0.49
PHP 4.3.4 and 5.0 is in BETA 4

UTF-8 Support hit MySQL in version 4.1


So what do I do? Anything is going to involve breaking one of my rules. 
Or I go out and buy a copy of RedHat EL 3.0 ?

What distros do you go for in production servers these days?

Cheers

-- 
Dan Field <dof at llgc.org.uk> 
	Support Programmer: Cymru ar y we 
http://www.cymruarywe.org
http://www.walesontheweb.org