./configure problems on Fedora Core 8

[Carlos Picazzo <ojaiguy(at)gmail(dot)com>]

I've asked on the Fedora Forums and the postgres IRC channel but haven't 
received any feedback.  I'm guessing there's just a library I'm missing
and I've tried this in 8.1.x, 8.2.6 and now 8.3.0 with the same result 
so at least that's consistent.  But when I do a './configure 
--enable-thread-safety', it eventually bombs out saying:

  ...
  checking for sgmlspl... sgmlspl
  checking thread safety of required library functions... no
  configure: error: thread test program failed
  This platform is not thread-safe. Check the file 'config.log'for the 
exact reason.

Upon checking the config.log, it says:

  | #define MEMSET_LOOP_LIMIT 1024
  | /* end confdefs.h. */
  | #include "./src/test/thread/thread_test.c"
  configure:22450: result: no
  configure:22459: error: thread test program failed
  This platform is not thread-safe. Check the file 'config.log'for the 
exact reason.

Google searches show some posts where there have been instances where 
thread_test.c doesn't actually exist but this isn't the case here.  This 
completes successfully on an old and obsolete FC4 system so I think it's 
just that I'm missing a particular safe thread library or something. 
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Carlos