[dd32]

Just because a Linux Distribution releases a release with an old version of PHP, it doesnt make it a current-generation PHP release.

Yes, It might have extra security patches applied to it[PHP], but Security is not the reason behind applications increasing their PHP version requirements.

Looking at the centos site, it seems that CentOs currently ships with PHP 5.1.6 (The latest in the 5.1 branch). 5.1.6 was released in August 2006, that's 6 years ago. CentOs currently ships with 6 year old software?

Ultimately, only 3.3% of all current WordPress installs are on 5.1.6, and i'd be willing to bet that most of those are sysadmins who are not willing to put the time into testing the PHP 5.2 packages that are available. WordPress has to do what's best in the communities interest, and if that's supporting somethin which 95%+ of hosts use, and the rest have available to them in some form, then WordPress needs to move forward and that few percent will have to do something about it.

The same can be said about IE6, The WordPress Admin does NOT work in IE6 anymore (Well it does, but it looks even worse than 3.1 did). Many corporations run IE6 due to not wanting to update,

People need to bite the bullet and invest in their infrastructure and software environments.