Hi So as you might have noticed already php 5.2 got removed from the tree because it has been end-of-life since Jan 2011. It has been kept in tree for people to be able transfer over to 5.3 easily. Since php 5.3 is also reaching end-of-life, php 5.4 and 5.5 has been commited and a direct update path from php 5.2 to 5.4 has been configured for people still having php 5.2 installed. The reason for doing this is obvious, 5.3 will be dead, however we are keeping that in tree as well because the transition from 5.2 to 5.3 is better (e.g. there is still register_globals support in 5.3).
If you are not running 5 year old Joomla or WorldPress installations the upgrade should be a piece of cake, and there should not be any need for code modification. The following sites completely describe how to migrate from 5.2.x to 5.3.x and then to 5.4.x if needed. http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.php http://php.net/manual/en/migration54.php If you have E_DEPRECATED configured in php-5.3 you will always get a list of functions that will get *removed* in 5.4, so you can prepare and fix your php code before going to 5.4.
