Isn't it possible to have a make target "make configure"?
Wouldn't it be possible to make this part of a "make cleanall", or whatever an appropriate metatarget is?
Is there some way to detect when ./confiugre absolutely needs to be run, and make that part of some metatarget?
What I envision is that we can have both:
* running ./configure; make works (and doesn't do way too much work)
* running "make", or perhaps some target "make confbuild" works and runs configure.
There is of course the issue that make already runs loads of submakes of packages, that in turn must run ./configure, so in the sage build process, "./configure" is already commonly triggered by make. I don't think we'd want to change that, so it seems to me it makes sense to have "./configure" run under control of make for sage as well (under certain conditions).