Hi Kim,
regarding the statement that the Oracle libraries don't work under FreeBSD your engineers are not right, I think. Because Oracle runs fine under FreeBSD (install instructions you'll find when you search for Oracle at www.freebsd.org).
See http://www.scc.nl/~marcel/howto-oracle.html or http://www.lf.net/lf/pi/oracle/install-linux-oracle-on-freebsd.
Also the php-port seems to be just fine when configuring php for other databases than Oracle.
The problem for configuring php for Oracle under FreeBSD, I think, is just that Oracle has to run in the linux emulator environment. That means you have to install and start Oracle from a shell that has a special environment (for instance a special LDCONFIG_PATH).
So when you configure php with oracle this configuration needs some libraries from the compat ld path. This you normally can only provide with configuring php within the compat shell. But when you do this the php configure will miss some libraries from FreeBSD.
Another way in my opinion is that one have to patch the configure script or the Makefile generated by the php configure so that the compiler has to link the compat libraries instead of original linux libraries.
In one of the above mentioned Oracle install instructions they do:
...
edit lib/sysliblist replace "-lnsl -lm" with:
"/compat/linux/lib/ld-linux.so.2 /compat/linux/lib/libm.so.6 /compat/linux/lib/libdl.so.2 /compat/linux/lib/libpthread.so.0 /compat/linux/lib/libc.so.6 /compat/linux/lib/libnsl.so.1"
...
I don't know where to patch the php configureor related Makefile but I think a similar job has to be done.
bye
Steffen
