Does "no luck" mean that despite you have installed the package mpfr-devel you still get the same error,
Yes, I guess that my message was essentially useless, so sorry about that - in fact, I needed to install MPFR from source...
However, the GOOD news is that I have managed to successfully compile polymake!
It only took about two hours of chasing packages and installation errors, but they were all dependencies rather than anything actually in polymake; once the configuration was fixed, the compilation stage worked fine.
In case any future people might be interested, I ended up having to do the following
- install GMP using yum (the package manager)
- compile MPFR from source
- set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to point to /usr/local/lib
- install various Perl modules, which involved the most work due to LOTS of dependencies, and various tools whose libraries ended up in the wrong places; this step alone involved a mixture of "yum", compilation from source, symlinks etc.
- install Java JDK