import version and changelog into deb?

[Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu>]

I've got a specialized piece of software I wrote and maintain (it's a
theatre sound system, for playing music cues and sound effects for live
theatre).  In order to distribute among the various computers I use it
on, I've packaged it as a .deb.  I also use svn for version control, and
autotools to control the builds.

It would make my life a little bit easier if I could automatically
import the package version from my configure.ac, and my changelog from
my svn changelog.

So far I haven't found a way to do that, so I've been using dch.

Is there a way?