I'm trying to build/install libguestfs (for virt-edit) on a RHEL7 server, where I have no root access. I couldn't find any pre-built binaries online, so have been trying to build from source (downloaded from https://download.libguestfs.org/). I'm using the latest stable version, 1.44.1.

I have followed the instructions at https://libguestfs.org/guestfs-building.1.html, but './configure' is failing with:

checking for gperf... no
configure: error: gperf must be installed

Indeed, it seems gperf is not installed. I then built gperf from source and symlinked the binary to '~/bin/gperf', which is on my PATH.

The problem is that I can't work out how to get libguestfs's ./configure script to pick up this manually-compiled copy of gperf (which I don't have permissions to place in a standard location under /usr/).

Can anyone suggest a solution/workaround?

(There may be a similar problem for some of the other external dependencies that are checked after gperf - I couldn't see a way to get configure to continue on failure or equivalent).

Thanks in advance,

Lewis