There's a bug in the configure script that is causing auto-reruns of ./configure to not inherit original command line options if there was more than one. For instance, if I run: ./configure --with-gmime-version=2.4 --prefix=/home/jrollins/opt/notmuch Then in Makefile.config I get: configure_options = --with-gmime-version=2.4--prefix=/home/jrollins/opt/notmuch This means that auto-reruns of configure will not get the proper options. I tracked this down to an issue with IFS and /bin/sh. The first line of ./configure is: readonly DEFAULT_IFS=$IFS DEFAULT_IFS is then used to reset IFS after it is modified within the script. The problem is that /bin/sh is setting DEFAULT_IFS to be NULL (i.e. ''), which leads to no separation between variables when "$@" is expanded (which is itself problematic since I don't think "@" should use the IFS when expanded). So this might be a bug in dash. I don't know. In any event we need to fix this somehow. I see two obvious solutions: * use /bin/bash. This a one line diff that fixes the problem immediately. * replace: IFS=$DEFAULT_IFS with: unset IFS Unsetting IFS also resets IFS to the default, without going through this intermediate step. I'm ok with either solution, but I'll wait for some feedback since I imagine someone will have an opinion. jamie.