I have a Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) install for my desktop, and I have two VPS servers that run Ubuntu (11.04 LTS) as well. I have PHP running on these servers using fcgi, but I want to upgrade to the lastest version of PHP (5.4.3) and include the modules that I need baked right in. It just so happens that the regular ./configure script happens to include all of the things that I need. So from here, I want to make a deb package that I can use on my two VPS servers so that I can quickly install it using apt-get install php. What do I have to do in order for this to happen?
I would be making the package from the desktop installation that I have (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) and distributing them to my servers via ftp or setting up a lunchpad account. The desktop is a stock install, and the only extra thing that I added was the lib2xml-dev so that I could compile php. The servers are also bare, only running 10 proccess, including nginx, and php-cgi.
Download and build the source package from Debian testing; they currently seem to be on PHP 5.4.4. (You may need to add some backports etc, though.) Set up your own repository and add it to /etc/apt/sources.list.d on the servers. You may need to build on a 11.04 box in order to be able to install on 11.04 (or play tricks with versioned dependencies).