When you see the following error during the perl Makefile.PL stage:

** A test compilation with your Makefile configuration
** failed. This is most likely because your C compiler
** is not ANSI. Apache requires an ANSI C Compiler, such
** as gcc. The above error message from your compiler
** will also provide a clue.
 Aborting!

it's possible that you have a problem with a compiler. It may be improperly installed or not installed at all. Sometimes the reason is that your Perl executable was built on a different machine, and the software installed on your machine is not the same. Generally this happens when you install prebuilt packages, such as rpm or deb. You may find that the dependencies weren't properly defined in the Perl binary package and you were allowed to install it even though some essential packages were not installed.

The most frequent pitfall is a missing gdbm library (see the next section).

But why guess, when we can actually see the real error message and understand what the real problem is? To get a real error message, edit the Apache src/Configure script. Around line 2140, you should see a line like this:

if ./helpers/TestCompile sanity; then

Add the -v option, as follows:

if ./helpers/TestCompile -v sanity; then

and try again. Now you should get a useful error message.