As Drupal, PHP is also moving -- and it moves fast. On June 16 Christian Seiler suggested adding lambda and closures to the language and on August 1 the first alpha of PHP 5.3 containing this and more is out. And we thought the language will never get them...there are other niceties -- just one question remains, how long before Drupal can use this?
It depends when RHEL is released. If they include PHP 5.3, then 2 years. If not, about 7.
This is why long term stable software is not always a good thing! It holds back, um, everyone else.
Do I need to register GoPHP53.org? :-)
http://lwn.net/Articles/286874/ "It was also guessed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 might not come out for some time and that it would definitely not be based on Fedora 9... but probably Fedora 11, 12 or even 13." Compare this with http://wiki.php.net/todo/php53 stable release between mid September and mid October.
As Fedora 10 is 2008-10-28 and Fedora 11 is 2009-04-01 I guess Fedora 12 is some time 2009 October. While PHP5.3 might miss Fedora 11, there is little doubt that it will be in Fedora 12... there is hope.