I just tried the rpm2cpio+cpio approach but that too didn't work.
One difference I noticed is that if I build giflib from source, it installs
the .so files in lib/.
But if I extract from the cpio, they get installed in lib64/ (Note that I
had to extract from both giflib rpm and giflib-devel rpm because
giflib-devel rpm lib64 simply had symbolic links which are supposed to link
to the .so files extracted from the giflib rpm).

I updated LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the new lib64/ dir.

That leads me to a question: Just as we have LIBOTF_CFLAGS, LIBOTF_LIBS,
can we not have LIBGIF_CFLAGS and LIBGIF_LIBS?
I tried setting LIBGIF env var to "-L/path/to/the/lib64 -lgif" before doing
./configure.. but that did not help.

Something else is not right in my system.. but at least I am glad I can
still build emacs, be it without gif.

configure finds the gif_lib.h, I find that GifMakeMapObject reference in
that .h but somehow configure thinks that it's not there.

My package building fu is limited to this so I cannot debug why configure
thinks that GifMakeMapObject is not found in -lgif.



On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:16 AM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
wrote:

> > I don't think I can install RPM packages in my $HOME without sudo. Can I?
>
> Depending what you mean by that, yes, it can be done.
> Just unpack the tarball with rpm2cpio+cpio.
>
> This will typically then require playing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH or
> somesuch, tho.
>
> I've done it in the past and I'm glad I don't need to do any more.
>
>
>         Stefan
>