after a couple hours of wasting my time trying to figure out why the php 4.3.4 ports install wouldn't compile (configure), I finally found it.
after running make from the ports directory, configure in the php SAPI dir crashes with an error about perl or apxs not being found. There is an error in the logic in the configure file resulting in nothing being set for the APXS path. To fix this, I added:
APXS="apxs"
at around line 3161.. between:
if test -z "$withval" || echo "$withval" | grep '^/' >/dev/null ; then
APXS=$withval
else
ep_dir="`echo $withval|sed 's%/*[^/][^/]*/*$%%'`"
ep_realdir="`(cd \"$ep_dir\" && pwd)`"
APXS="$ep_realdir/`basename \"$withval\"`"
fi
fi
APXS="apxs"
$APXS -q CFLAGS >/dev/null 2>&1
if test "$?" != "0"; then
what a gigantic waste of time