PHP 5.1 regex incompatability blocks feature creation

First I love features. It's amazing, and has saved me a mountain of time. Second let me say, I'm not the most advanced RegExer and am only a year or so into Drupal. So if I've made a mistake, just let me apologize in advance and feel free to hit me with a clue stick.

On line 151 of features.admin.inc, there is a regex version check that uses named sub-patterns. It uses a syntax for the patterns that was only introduced in PHP 5.2.2.

?<name>\d+
vs
?P<name>\d+.

The changelog below indicates that the ?P syntax should work in both 5.1 and 5.2+.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

This is what is in features:
preg_match('/^(?<core>\d+\.x)-(?<major>\d+)\.(?<patch>\d+)-?(?<extra>\w+)?$/', $element['#value'], $matches);

I believe this *should* work in 5.1 and 5.2+. It works in my install.
preg_match('/^(?P<core>\d+\.x)-(?P<major>\d+)\.(?P<patch>\d+)-?(?P<extra>\w+)?$/', $element['#value'], $matches);

Those of us presently trapped by the packaged PHP install on Centos/RHEL 5.x would love to see it stay 5.1 compatible, for a little while at least. Of course, I know that can be a pain in the butt, and would understand if you didn't want to have to worry about older installs.

Again, thanks for the amazing creation that is features.