Not all of us are using PHP apps that are ready for PHP 5.3, so we need to rebuild PHP 5.2.x for some newer OS’s. Unfortunately, trying to rebuild the PHP 5.2.13 SRPM for Fedora 11 (the last Fedora to use PHP 5.2.x), on Fedora 13 doesn’t work as-is. The “configure” file ends up broken, and running it produces an endless stream of errors, starting with:
cat: confdefs.h: No such file or directory ./configure: line 387: ac_fn_c_try_run: command not found
...
It took me a while of looking around, but the solution was found on the Ubuntu bug tracker, specifically in the comment #17 by Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz, which pointed to a PLD patch for the same issue. Patching the Fedora 11 SRPM with that patch (needs some fuzz) makes it build properly.