I got strace working. It is only opening the default.d directory, local.d directory (both empty) and my default.ini and local.ini files. I'm ignoring futon now since it doesn't agree with the actual behavior. It is easy to tell what db directory is being used so I'm just playing with that one setting.
I tried deleting the default config line and it made no difference. I looked at the process with ps and it is a very long complicated erlang line that starts beam. So I don't think I'll try that trick. It may be a bug, but I'm not confident I could put together a decent report. The 'how to repeat" section would be pretty big. Also I guess it could be a problem with build-couch. I've got an old install of build-couchdb that works, so I'll use that now. I guess the next thing to try would be to build from source instead of using build-couchdb, but I've never had any luck doing that before.
