After the voting this week on the PHP Internals mailing list, the releasemaster Illia Alshanetsky summed everything up, and announced the intention to release a 5.3 release. The following list of features is taken from this survey, and each of the features recieved 10 or more votes (out of the possible 28), and is therefor put on the todo list for a possible PHP 5.3. Please keep in mind that it is extremely early, and this list will definately change. Items will be added and removed from the list, and a whole lot of development needs to be done before it is finally there. Don't rewrite your applications just yet. So, on to the list...

The following list of features is announced to be placed on the ToDo list for a possible PHP 5.3. This list will definately change, and in either way, no rights can be claimed in any way on this information:

• Split off deprecation from E_STRICT into E_DEPRECATED (22 votes)
• Apply the Late Static Binding Patch (21 votes)
• Merge __callStatic patch from PHP 6 (20.5 votes)
• Backport the namespaces patch for PHP 6 (20 votes)
• OpenID enabling patch for OpenSSL and PHP 5 (20 votes)
• Introduce mysqlind library into core (19.5 votes)
• Merge Matt's ZEND_SIGNED_MULTIPLY_LONG() optimization patch (17.5 votes)
• Merge the zend_arg_info const'ify patch (15 votes)
• Implement Sqlite3 support via the ext/sqlite extension (14.5 votes)
• Add array_replace[_recursive] functions (patch is already available) (13 votes)
• Introduce new php.ini files parser/scanner + CGI/FastCGI (13 votes)
• Symlink the intl extension from PECL (12 votes)

Looks like a nice patching release. No major changes, most internal. Though some may reflect into userland, it's definately not a major upgrade. Namespaces implementation should be nice, though a lot of dust is going to be re-arranged before all the developers accept the final implementation.
Most remarkable feature? That's for another story, which you can read right here.

~RW