Even though I do not recommend it for production yet, I packaged and am playing with php 5.3.0 - src.rpm at

http://www.clfsrpm.net/php53/

(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.