I recently had the need to compile Git on a CentOS 6 system, because the available version (v1.7.1) did not support the ls-remote command used  by the Jenkins Git plugin. The various posts I found via Google were missing a crucial prerequisite, hence this short post.

• Uninstall old Git with

  yum remove git

• Install required packages (for me!) with

  sudo yum install libcurl-devel zlib-devel asciidoc openssl-devel xmlto
  

• Download source code from https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git
• Extract source with

  gzip -dc <FILE> | tar -xvf -

• Compilation and installation

  make configure
  ./configure --prefix=/usr
  make all
  sudo make install install-doc install-html

And that should be it.