Minicom version in Rocky 9 - can we go from 2.7 to the current version (2.8 or above?)

No, that’s basically due to the fact they are Fedora source rpms and they don’t always work when building against Rocky 9 or whatever. If you take into account that the equivalent Fedora version for RHEL9 is Fedora 34, then it’s not really surprising. Sometimes you can be lucky, sometimes not.

For example:

or:

both show it was possible to build a Fedora 41 on Rocky 8 or 9. If it relies on something more specific in terms of versions, then if that newer package doesn’t get installed as a dependency from EPEL or wherever because it doesn’t exist, then we are out of luck.

Someone could potentially edit, fix and repackage the source rpm and make it work with an older version of autoconf but that would require far more advanced knowledge. Either that or download the minicom source, and just configure, make, make install etc assuming also that it doesn’t have strict dependency requirements.