See the perl part, It was a bitch to find the 'correct' way to do this. If you have v5.2.6 installed, no problem. But a 'bootstrap' compile would fail. Also, to get it to compile I had to _remove_ freetype-devel. (using freetype 1 or 2). If ./configure finds the include files it tries to use it and fails. I tried to get it to work, but failed.
Created attachment 6706 [details] updated spec file
Building perl separately is not needed. The "libpath" patch takes care of this. The problem is that you've removed this patch because it doesn't apply cleanly. The right fix is to adapt the libpath patch (done). Looking into the freetype issue now.
No changes required because of freetype either. Works for me since I updated to freetype 2.0.1 (now in the tree that will become Rawhide in a couple of days).
I was doing this under RH6.1. Probably a 6 -> 7 thing.