"A few days ago, the first release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 has been published by the PHP Group, providing many improvements :

Namespaces support
Late static binding
MySQL native driver
Phar support…
I just built the packages for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” on amd64 and i386 and I will maintain them during the whole release cycle (RC2 and so on…).

Please note that they should NOT be installed on production servers : Suhosin and some important patches are not applied, PECL extensions are not available (yet)… They’re here for testing purpose only.

To fetch them, just add these temporary entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list and upgrade your instances :

deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all
But please DO read the full announcement before any further move."