Attempting to follow my install directions on a centos VM I found I was missing a bunch of things.  So here's a quick brain dump of packages you can install to make emacs compile without too much trouble.
  • yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
  • yum -y install gtk+-devel gtk2-devel
  • yum -y install libXpm-devel
  • yum -y install libpng-devel
  • yum -y install giflib-devel
  • yum -y install libtiff-devel libjpeg-devel
  • yum -y install ncurses-devel
  • yum -y install gpm-devel dbus-devel dbus-glib-devel dbus-python
  • yum -y install GConf2-devel pkgconfig
  • yum -y install libXft-devel
  • cd ~/Emacs/emacs-build
  • ~/Emacs/emacs-bzr/configure --prefix=/usr/local --without-selinux --with-x-toolkit=gtk
You may not need to build without selinux, YMMV.