The PHP developers stopped providing security patches for the 5.3
branch on 14 August 2014. They "strongly urge" to upgrade to current
versions "as using older versions may expose you to security
vulnerabilities and bugs that have been fixed in more recent versions"
of PHP.
The PHP53 branch was released from maintainership today, so it's being
deprecated with removal set for 15 April 2015.
There were only 8 ports limited to php53, six of which were pecl- ports.
These ports must be upgraded to use a later version of php (5.6 is
recommended) soon, or they will be removed with php53.
Note that all 8 ports incorrectly set the PHP_DEFAULT_VERSION, so this
was changed to use IGNORE_WITH_PHP instead while here.
PR: 198150
2899abe804