my system was with the USE="-libpng", and php emerged properly without relying on libpng to be installed, but configure fails because it cannot find libpng: configure: error: libpng.(a|so) not found My assumption is that libpng is now a requirement for php.
Do you have 'gd' in your USE flags? PHP requires gd to be built to libpng if you use gd. There is no way to force this inside portage presently unfortunetly (but it is being worked on). Any specific reason you are excluding libpng from your system?
gd isn't explicitly in the use flags. No, I didn't have an explicit reason to *not* use libpng. When using ufed I just turned off everything that I wasn't planning on using for this particularl computer. Installing libpng fixed this problem.
Fixed in new PHP eclass to be released very soon. When it is, please test it ASAP.
works for me
closing old bugs.