Building Git 1.8 on Centos 6

We use Centos as a VM for development. Intellij IDEA was complaining about the 1.7.1 version from the Centos distro, requiring 1.7.1.1. Picky.

So I grabbed the git source:
$ git clone https://github.com/git/git
$ cd git
$ make
...
http-push.c:920: error: ‘xml_cdata’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http-push.c:921: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘XML_Parse’
http-push.c:926: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘XML_ErrorString’
http-push.c:927: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘XML_GetErrorCode’
http-push.c:930: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘XML_ParserFree’
http-push.c: In function ‘remote_ls’:
http-push.c:1154: error: ‘XML_Parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http-push.c:1154: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘parser’
http-push.c:1161: error: ‘parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http-push.c:1164: error: ‘xml_cdata’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http-push.c: In function ‘locking_available’:
http-push.c:1228: error: ‘XML_Parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http-push.c:1228: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘parser’
http-push.c:1235: error: ‘parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)

Oh man, compile errors. Bad.

The key seemed to be:
expat.h: No such file or directory

A bit o Googling: missing library headers.
$ sudo yum install expat-devel

Restart the build. Works.

$ make install

Whee!
$ git --version
git version 1.8.3.2.768.g911011a

ps. Dont forget the
export PATH=~/bin:$PATH