Thanks to the people who tried to help me figure this out. It turns out the issue with emerging php (missing mysql libraries) had to do with a buggy custom eclass that had been put by this box's previous admin under one of the portdir_overlay directories. When I renamed the overlay'ed eclass dir to eclass.old, I was instantly able to emerge mysql (and it actually emerged this time). Once that was done, I was able to emerge php with no problems.
Thanks again, Jason -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
