'emerge php' fails with error when bison is not installed: [...] checking for gawk... gawk checking for bison... no checking for byacc... no checking for bison version... invalid configure: WARNING: bison versions supported for regeneration of the Zend/PHP parsers: 1.28 1.35 1.75 1.875 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 2.4.3 2.5 2.5.1 2.6 2.6.1 2.6.2 2.6.4 (found: none). checking for re2c... no configure: WARNING: You will need re2c 0.13.4 or later if you want to regenerate PHP parsers. configure: error: bison is required to build PHP/Zend when building a GIT checkout! [...] After emergin sys-devel/bison-2.4.3, php install correctly. It is most likely the build dependency because it seems to run fine after removing bison again. Reproduced on stable amd64 system. emerge -pv php [...] [ebuild R ] dev-lang/php-5.3.28-r3:5.3 USE="apache2 berkdb bzip2 cli crypt ctype curl exif fileinfo filter ftp gd gdbm hash iconv imap ipv6 json kerberos ldap mysql nls pdo phar posix readline session simplexml snmp sockets sqlite ssl threads tokenizer unicode xml xmlwriter zip zlib -bcmath -calendar -cdb -cgi -cjk -curlwrappers -debug -embed -enchant -firebird -flatfile -fpm -gmp -inifile -intl -iodbc -ldap-sasl -libedit -mhash -mssql -mysqli -mysqlnd -oci8-instant-client -odbc -pcntl -postgres -qdbm -recode (-selinux) -sharedmem -soap -spell -sqlite2 (-sybase-ct) -sysvipc -tidy -truetype -wddx -xmlreader -xmlrpc -xpm -xslt" 0 kB
*** Bug 517758 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This problem also exists in php-5.3.29, and as bug #517758 mentions, we need a lower bound on >=bison-2.4.3 now that the 2.3 series is gone. But php-5.3 is being removed soon, hopefully, so I don't think we're going to have a fix for this before then (sorry). If you're not married to php-5.3, this problem doesn't exist in 5.4, 5.5, or 5.6. So as a note-to-self, this will be fixed as part of removing php-5.3 from the tree.
Adding depends to remind to close when php 5.3 is removed
php 5.3 removed
