Thanks Wolfgang!

I was able to make it work without -lgif in the LDFLAGS.
The rpms I extracted did not have libgif.a.

This is a very enlightening thread for me: Learnt about CentOS .rpm files
for RHEL, rpm2cpio, LDFLAGS vs LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Thanks to everyone for the help :).

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 8:36 AM Wolfgang Jenkner <wjenkner@inode.at> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 11 2015, Kaushal Modi wrote:
>
> > The LDFLAGS did the magic, thank you!
>
> Actually,
>
> ./configure ... LDFLAGS=-L/path/to/the/lib64
> CPPFLAGS=-I/path/to/gifincludedir
>
> should be enough since configure will add -lgif to LIBS anyway (or do
> something else to that effect).
>
> > (I wonder why setting the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and $PKG_CONFIG_PATH env vars
> > did not help.)
>
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used at runtime by the dynamic linker ld.so(8),
> whereas LDFLAGS belongs to the GNU buildsystem, see
>
> (info "(autoconf) Preset Output Variables").
>
> PKG_CONFIG_PATH is a search path for *.pc files, which giflib doesn't
> install (as Paul already mentioned), see pkg-config(1).
>
> There are some (completely untested) variations on the theme:
>
> One could pass
>
> LDFLAGS="-L/path/to/the/lib64 -Wl,-rpath=/path/to/the/lib64"
>
> to configure and so avoid changing LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
>
> Or, if you have the static lib64/libgif.a you could link emacs to it
> instead (by simply moving away the lib64/libgif.so* you have in your
> home directory before building emacs); in this case, you could even
> completely remove the giflib stuff from your home directory after
> building emacs.
>