Ileana Dumitrescu wrote:
> This bug should be resolved with a patch submitted on Savannah:
> https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/index.php?10481

While this patch is an improvement — it avoids an error message
if $multilib was unset or empty or started with a '-' character —
it still is not the full fix. Namely, it does word splitting.
When I set
  export multilib='yes and no'
then run configure, I see an error message:

  checking dynamic linker characteristics... ../configure: line 11854: test: too many arguments

Really, word splitting should be avoided on unstrusted inputs [1].
Here is a patch that does so.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3811345/