Shall packages build-depend on GNU auto-tools?

[debacle@knorke.in-berlin.de (W. Borgert)]

Hi,

what do you think?  Shall packages build-depend on autoconf,
automake, and libtool?  After all, the Debian maintainer 
(or even the upstream maintainer) will run these tools.  So
debian/rules should just run ./configure && make.  Maybe
a "touch Makefile.in configure" before might be useful, but
the build-dependencies seem wrong to me.  As I understand,
the GNU auto-tools should never be prerequisite to build a
software package.  Do I miss sth. important here? 

Cheers,
-- 
W. Borgert <debacle@debian.org>