Even though I do not recommend it for production yet, I packaged and am playing with php 5.3.0 - src.rpm at
(needed epel to build)
Other than the suhosin loadable module messing up pear's ability to do anything, initial tests show it working fairly well.
Looks like the enchant module is a nogo on CentOS (aspell too old) but in the few hours of testing, none of my code (yet) is broken in it.
There are some warnings in the log files w/ respect to squirrelmail and setting time zone (stock centos squirrelmail), I'll have to look into that, and the php src.rpm there actually has a minor bug - it should obsolete/provide pecl-Fileinfo, but I'll wait for suhosin to come up with their patch to core php before I bother to update.
Anyway, it's there for anyone who feels like playing with 5.3.0 to see what breaks, you just to rebuild the src.rpm.