I have both Apache and PHP set up manually, albeit the latter without CURL.

There is this jungle of instructions and explanations on extensions for PHP.

I have a very straightforward question - what do I need to do to enable CURL in a more dynamic way. I resent the idea of static linking, in fact I hate and avoid static linking like the plague. Is it possible to have my Apache and PHP understand that there is CURL in town? I can compile CURL if necessary.

Package management may be out of the question, because I built PHP myself - I am on Ubuntu, and it does not provide PHP without Suhosin and a a whole lot of time, so I removed it and built PHP myself. The whole slew of related questions simply propse installing "php5-curl" package, which is exactly one thing I CANNOT do since it installs it in a completely unrelated directory, which my PHP does not even seem to bother linking to.