Managing automake symlinks

[Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>]

I'd check this myself, but I haven't got a sufficiently easily greppable
archive to hand ...

I'm maintaining the project I'm currently hacking on as a native Debian
package, which also happens to use autoconf and automake. automake likes
to make symlinks to some scripts in /usr/share/automake that it uses
(such as install-sh, missing, and mkinstalldirs here), which are then
dereferenced by a 'make dist'.

Since I'm maintaining it as a native Debian package, I never actually do
a 'make dist', so unless I dereference them manually the symlinks end up
in the .tar.gz. However, manually copying the files around means that
they don't automatically get updated when I install a new version of
automake - but I like going the native package route, as I get several
useful things for free.

How do other people who use automake in native packages handle this?
Should I just leave the symlinks in there and build-depend on automake?

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]