I'm not familiar with this package but when you say you use old sparemint package, why are you trying to compile using make and not using RPM's building capabilities? In such SRPM is in most cases everything you need to patch, compile, link and install.Just to make sure it wasn't a problem with the older version of popt we have in Sparemint I thought I would try to build that too. Is this how things snowball ?
-- MiKRO / Mystic Bytes http://mikro.atari.org