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You mention two distros that are designed for stability. Thats very different from following the bleeding edge and they have their purpose and reason for it(Which while developers like myself and I assume you sometimes forget, our server admin friends never do). If you want to follow the leading edge there is always also the option of making your own packages.

I use CentOS in my stack. It's going to get it today. Because I'm going to compile it =)

You may want to try DotDeb [1], they already have PHP 5.4 packaged for Debian :-)

[1]: http://www.dotdeb.org/

There's nothing stopping you from using, say, remi or webtatic repos on CentOS.