The patch below was found in gentoo:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/205558
http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=167856&action=view

in the last package revision, the dependency was on libdb-dev. As a
precautiory mesaure, make the depend explicit.

this abvoids lintian warnings and makes updating the file easier.

this file could potentially be included upstream

add a missing #include and a short documentation

instead, the files are symlinked from the system copies from the
autotools-dev package to ensure that always the latest version of them
are being used.

distribution tarballs...

add autoconf for svn snapshots
remove libdb (probably wrong, verify that!)

create VERSION.txt for svn snapshots
fix clean target for svn snapshots
call bootstrap to create the configure script

branch.

postinst script. This should prevent problems like LP: #222999

files as well