Fortunately autotools/automake bastardry was unnecessary for building Apache. Was just a matter of building apr, apr-util, and apache in that order in FREMANTLE_ARMEL scratchbox, putting modules and binaries on the device, and then updating my old 2.2.15 configs (which was the longest, most tedious part).

I'd totally make a .deb but I don't want to have the self-expectation of managing it or determining a canonical configuration structure on-disk for Maemo apache. Plus all the modules would ideally be their own .debs too...

tl:dr; building Apache on scratchbox is way easier than Pulseaudio. And building anything with the FREMANTLE_ARMEL_GCC472 scratchbox profile is a pain in the ***.