I would quite like to be running the latest production releases of PHP and MySQL on my production RHEL5.3 server.
PHP so that I can use Zend Framework 1.9 which only supports PHP 5.2.4 or later.
MySQL because they claim 5.1 is faster.
I am a little concerned about installing from RPM's because of breaking dependencies and having to manually keep things up-to-date afterwards.
After a bit of research, I found the Remi Repository.
If I add this to my list of repositories, yum update will be able to upgrade PHP and MySQL.
This sounds too good to be true – so are there any pitfalls or problems that I should be aware of?
Best Answer
I do not see why "this sounds too good to be true".
Considerinh PHP 5.2 was released quite a few years ago, the problem is that Redhat/CentOS are really late about that (yeah, I know, "stable" and all that, which means not updating anything except for security reasons)
Happily, some people stepped up, and did the job that had to be done : create the RPM packages that so many of us needed ;-)
Only thing there might be : it won't be "offcial" packages ; so maybe not OK with the policy of your system admins ?
Still, if in doubt : before using those on your production server, you should try them on a test server (if you don't have one, a Virtual Machine will do just fine), just to be sure -- and, also, to check that your application works fine on 5.2
On the other hand, you might want to try compiling PHP by yourself : it is definitly not that hard, and it's a good thing to know :-)