I'm trying to compile rpm-3.0.4 from source and ran into this problem while running configure. Since I'm using windows right now I can't give the exact error message but basicly the configure script couldn't find libbz2.a. I have libbz2.a installed in /usr/lib and I haven't run into any problems with this library before (although I can't remember compiling anything that needed it). I did try running ldconfig just to make sure that that wasn't the problem and it didn't help. I tried running make too but it failed on some bzip2 stuff which I'm assuming is related to this problem. Any suggestions?
You will also need /usr/include/bzlib.h, and may need /usr/lib/libbz2.so. The Right Thing To Do is install the bzip2-0.9.5d package. Alternatively, after running ./autogen.sh, edit config.h by hand and turn off bzip2 support (that should work, but I haven't tried recently).
Alright. Looks like it was a problem with bzip2. I was using bzip2-1.0pre8 and after going back to bzip2-0.9.5d everything works. I checked the bzip2-1.0pre8 documentation and sure enough the calls to the bzip2 library were all renamed which would explain my problems.