The people who develop suPHP are assholes for not providing further documentation than what they’ve got on their site.
On Debian/Ubuntu, the packagers are assholes for not providing a sane configuration. The whole point of suPHP is to use the paranoid setting.
The people who develop PHP as a language are assholes for not getting their head out of their asses, considering security an afterthought.
Should you need to install it onto a Debian/Ubuntu system, be prepared to devote 48+ hours to getting it up and running properly, specially if you install PHP applications using APT.