Why does Apache want to use xcode for installation resources? When I try to run ./configure When building Apache with no unusual options this is part of the output:

checking for APR... yes
  setting CC to "/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/OSX10.9.xctoolchain/usr/bin/cc"
  setting CPP to "/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/OSX10.9.xctoolchain/usr/bin/cc -E"
  setting CFLAGS to " "
  setting CPPFLAGS to " -DDARWIN -DSIGPROCMASK_SETS_THREAD_MASK"
  setting LDFLAGS to " "
configure: 
configure: Configuring Apache Portable Runtime Utility library...
configure: 
checking for APR-util... yes
checking for gcc... /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/OSX10.9.xctoolchain/usr/bin/cc
checking whether the C compiler works... no


I don't have xcode installed, so why does it assume I do?  I tried running the configure like this after installing apple command line tools which includes gcc, etc. into /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/

CC=/usr/bin/gcc CPP=/usr/bin/cpp LTFLAGS=--tag=cc ./configure --prefix=/Users/&lt;me&gt;/it/apps/apache2/ --with-pcre=/usr/local/bin/pcre-config 


And the configure works (although I'm running into issues running make that I think are related).  Why, when which gcc returns /usr/bin/gcc, would Apache insist on looking in Applications/Xcode...?
It's hard to really know why the authors of the tool made a specific choice without tracking them down in many cases, but this one shouldn't be hard to guess.

Xcode is how Apple distributes a working C compiler to each version of OS X. therefore checking in Xcode for gcc makes good sense to me. 

As you correctly have demonstrated, if you prefer to install another compiler or store is elsewhere, the configure tool is happy to use another path to the compiler.