Compiling PHP 5.2.9 on CentOS 5.3

Recently, we were upgrading the development environment to CentOS 5.3 wih PHP 5.2.9 and ran across the following issues. This might help you save some times if you are trying the same so we are sharing the details here.
When trying to compile PHP 5.2.9 on CentOS 5.3 with the following configuration options:

#! /bin/sh
#
# Created by [...]