This package is a metapackage that, when installed, guarantees that you have at least one of the three server-side versions of the PHP5 interpreter installed. Removing this package won't remove PHP5 from your system, however it may remove other packages that depend on this one. . PHP5 is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly. This version of PHP5 was built with the Suhosin patch.