strange reconfigure issue

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Hi,
after Panama merged with upstream yesterday, many developers reported an 
issue with make reconfigure which fails with this message:

configure: Current directory is <USER_DIR>
configure: Since this is not the source root, configure will output the 
configuration here
configure: (as opposed to creating a configuration in 
<src_root>/build/<conf-name>).
configure: However, this directory is not empty. This is not allowed, 
since it could
configure: seriously mess up just about everything.

This message seems bogus because we're just running make reconfigure 
from the JDK top dir, but for some reason the makefile is going and look 
in our home folders, and then failing to take action (thankfully!).

To resolve the issue a full 'sh configure' was necessary. In my case I 
believe I also needed to close the terminal window and start over, but 
it's possible that's placebo.

After the remediation steps, even `make reconfigure` works as expected.

Was there a recent change (e.g. in the last week or so) introduced in 
this area which might have caused a lingering issue?

Cheers
Maurizio