by Jeff Shearer.
Actually the building from source has been easy so far. I have a had a slight learning curve, but as you can see, mostly that is learning where to find the source code.
The required php extensions are listed on page http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/PHP.
The specific libraries required on listed on http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Compiling_PHP_from_source The required libraries are: libxml2-dev, libcurl4-openssl-dev, libjpeg-dev, libpng-dev, libxpm-dev libmysqlclient-dev, libpq-dev, libicu-dev, libfreetype6-dev, libldap2-dev, libxslt-dev
You are correct, there is a repository called ports, however I have found that it is not as current as I would like for this project.
Thanks for your help.