Trouble with autoconf, automake and aclocal

[Andi Drebes <webmaster@programmierforen.de>]

Hello,
I am currently developing an application that I would like to distribute
over the internet. I read about autoconf, automake and aclocal and
recognized, that I've already used these programs to install other software
on my system. So I decided to use it for my application, too. I wrote a
configure.in and a makefile.am file. Then I ran

aclocal-1.4 && autoconf && automake-1.4 -a

without any errors at all. But when I want to create the tarball with "make
distcheck", it complains about missing files, such as mkinstalldirs,
install-sh and so on...

Is this a debian-specific problem? I talked with other people about that and
they did not have any idea why it does not work. (Perhaps I talked with the
wrong people :D)

Thanks in advance,
        Andi Drebes