Anyhow devel still does not load any externals, does look in the right place but cannot find any of the *_setup functions. Nothing else stands out in the -verbose output. I've been doing "./bootstrap.sh && autoconf && ./configure && make clean && make" each time...
well, rethinking what i said and rereading thomas's mail ... maybe you can't run both stable and devel on a machine, that has one of the binaries in the search path ... since the externals link back to the pd binary ... possibly to the wrong one ...
just a guess, though ... tim