Comment 1 for bug 1842947

After discussion with cjwatson in #ubuntu-devel, it looks like this is just a dpkg-specific packaging/build-rules issue; by default, packages will use dh_autoreconf, which will call autoreconf -f to force (re)creation of the configure file. The dpkg package has its own debian/rules call to autoreconf, however, and it doesn't pass -f.

This has been fixed (maybe unintentionally) upstream by commit c72f539b979a0c8647d2a6c62ee45565cd243b3d which moves the call to autoreconf into an 'autogen' file, but also more importantly changes the call from 'autoreconf -v -i' to 'autoreconf -f -i'.