I'm not sure if it's worth mentioning. Maybe you talk about something completly different, but my second harddrive on my spare empeg player still contains and runs the full blown debian installation in a chrooted environment. Including apache, php, sshd, ... (http://empeg.homelinux.com)
I'm always using the latest testing debian distribution which includes at the moment gcc-3.3 and libc-2.3.2. The latest apt-update I've done was about 1 month ago. Does this help in any way?