Thank you, Arne and Alon -- I finally managed to get Tunnelblick<http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/> more-or-less built using the new build system in 2.3_alpha2.
For the record, I had to use xxx*_LIBS*="-Lyyy" (not xxx*_LDFLAGS*) before ./configure, to get it working.