I'm trying to compile just the flashrom component of LinuxBios from svn, but make gives me an error telling me that I need to install pciutils-devel and zlib-devel. The problem is these packages are already installed.
I extracted the little .test.c program from the Makefile, and determined that the linker is unable to resolve the call to pci_alloc. The problem is I don't know why.
I've had similar issues after upgrading my compilation toolchain incorrectly and will wager a guess that the issues you are facing have more to do with your distribution than with flashrom. A few questions that come to mind -- Have you recently upgraded system packages such as libc, gcc, etc? Also, are you using crosstool?
Do you have all the -devel packages installed which distros like Debian and Redhat tend to omit.
Also, I think Mandriva / SuSE / Redhat / etc. have features tucked away which can help you to upgrade your whole distro from "basic" to "developer" or something to automagically install all -devel packages and libraries. If you have the hard disk space available, you may wish to try something like that just to be certain there's no easy fix.
The header is there in /usr/include/pci/pci.h,
and /usr/lib/libpci.a is there (but I don't know how to tell what symbols the library provides; reached the limit of my expertise there).
nm is your friend here ;-)