Thrift on CentOS 5.2? And as clean as possible

[Andrew Farley]

Hey guys,

I've been wrestling with getting thrift installed on a minimal install  
of CentOS 5.2 64-bit.  With the default boost package from the Cent  
repo it provides 1.33.1, the minimum requirements for thrift but the  
thrift ./configure script still complains about it not being valid.

I went down this route once before with another CentOS virtual  
machine, ended up having to manually compile and upgrade glib to  
install the latest boost, which then broke a bunch of other things  
which I started trying to recompile, and ended up failing miserably.   
I scrapped that VM and am starting over.

So, anyone have instructions/advice for getting it compiled/working on  
CentOS 5.2?

Or, instead of continuing to wrestle with compiling thrift, does  
anyone have or know where I can grab a thrift CentOS 5.2/RHEL4 RPM?   
I'm thus far unable to find it in RPM form and I have to keep this  
install as clean as possible because I will be replicating it via  
puppet to 30+ machines and soon thereafter, many, many more.  So, RPMs  
will be simple, recompiling a ton of packages and/or making my own  
RPMs will not be as easy/simple.

Thanks,

Andrew