In my seeking a managable way to build libtiff, on the Asterfax forum I got the following recommendation (from another fax user that made the move to libtiff 3.8.2):

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Hi Robert,
 
I have compiled libtiff-3.8.2 from the source package for my Fedora Core 4 machine.
I am not sure about CentOS, but I think you can try to do the same with rpmbuild and the source package for Fedora:
 
- Install the rpmbuild tools in CentOS;
- Download the source package for Fedora: http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/atrpms/src/fc6-i386/redhat/SRPMS.updates/libtiff-3.8.2-2.src.rpm
- Install the source package as a non-root user:
rpm -ivh libtiff-3.8.2-2.src.rpm
- Go to your rpmbuild folder: cd ~/rpmbuild
- Rebuild the package: rpmbuild -ba SPECS/libtiff.spec
 
If everything goes well, you will find a brand new set of RPM packages in the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/ (replace i386 for your actual architecture if you're not building on i386), which you can install with the upgrade RPM command: rpm -Uvh libtiff-3.8.2*.rpm

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 Does this 'look right' for Centos?  If not what do I change?

And how do I get the rpmbuild tools?   yum install rpmbuild  ??

Finally, once I have built 3.8.2, how would I migrate it to other systems?