If your distro's package maintainer is asleep at the wheel then you'll have to take matters into your own hand and source install. The Node team has done a gre

If your distro's package maintainer is asleep at the wheel then you'll have to take matters into your own hand and source install. The Node team has done a great job here, they have a number of ways of doing managed source installs that avoid a lot of the ugly hassles you can usually hit. Ruby has rvm which also handles this quite well. This helps work around any friction you might get at the distribution level. If PHP is being held back by distribution maintainers then that's a problem that the PHP community should fix. 5.3 came out in 2009, it's ancient.