PARmetis linking problem on Cartesius

We are having some issues configuring on Cartesius (the Dutch supercomputer).

It looks like we need to specify -lmetis on top of the regular -lparmetis when trying to link their build of the library. In principle, that case should be handled by the configure.ac. As far as I can see we try to first just use -lparmetis and if that fails, we try again with -lparmetis -lmetis.

However, that does not seem to work. The configure script fails saying it did not find the parmetis library. If I edit the first of the two tests to include -lmetis then it runs.

Looking at the output of an unedited version, I see

checking for ParMETIS_V3_RefineKway in -lparmetis... no
checking for ParMETIS_V3_RefineKway in -lparmetis... (cached) no
configure: error: "Failed to find a ParMETIS library"
make: *** [config.status] Error 1

I worry about the (cached) here. Could it be that the second test (the one design to handle the case we have here) is not run because somehow the script re-uses the result of the previous test?