Comment 5 for bug 393454

We (Andreas, Chris, Gustavo and I) discussed the issue on IRC, and agreed to use autoppa again to solve the problem of supporting multiple distributions.

However I just realized that the debhelper scripts do actually have a way to conditionally include dependences at build time, which is substvars/dh_gencontrol. The attached branch makes use of it, and I believe it's a pattern we can use in general to address this kind of issues. I rebuilt the packages and uploaded them to my PPA, the dapper/hardy ones don't have the update-motd dependency, while the intrepid/jaunty/karmic ones do have it, as expected.