Mike Lively has shared some of his thoughts on the late static binding functionality that will be in the upcoming PHP 5.3 - specifically the relationships of parents and children it has.

I won't rehash all of the arguments as you can quite easily find out my full thoughts by previous posts and on that mailing list thread. To put it simply I feel that somehow there needs to be a way to call methods in a parent class without losing the ability to reference back to the original called static.

He gives an example of what he's talking about (code) and, to help further his cause he's created three patches to make it work how he'd like.