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...
ok ... since the scons build system is working on debian now (ugly hack, though), i'd ask you to try it again... and please make sure to check out the latest devel_0_39 to a new folder to make sure, you have no old object files lying around ... i changed the location of the binaries back to ./bin ... to avoid confusion ... i don't have any problems on this machine to load externals, although both the debian package and devel are installed, so i think, it _is_ a user bug (sorry) or a build problem (flamewar) ...
<flamewar>i also enabled the scons compile cache to improve build speed if you compile devel regularly</flamewar>
cheers .... tim