Note that while PHP 5.3 is considered fairly stable, it
does cause a
lot of problems on existing sites. As of the upcoming PHP 6.0, many obsolete functions will disappear from PHP. As of PHP 5.3, users get warning messages about these "deprecated functions". While the functions are still in PHP, the warning messages can wreak havoc with pages, particularly if they get sent out before custom HTTP headers. It was a stupid design decision by PHP to issue on-screen warnings, rather than logging them in a more subtle manner. If you know what you're doing, you can suppress these warnings with ini_set(), but most users have no idea what to do when their host upgrades to PHP 5.3 and they're faced with a deluge of messages that break their site. I would imagine that LP will hold off as long as they can before switching to 5.3, just because so many sites are not going to be ready for it.
http://us.php.net/manual/en/migration53.deprecated.php