Comment 3 for bug 602132

 So frankly, I am not sure I can review the full diff you have in the
 merge request, but I can review the instructions in LP #602132.

 I think you could have done an autoreconf -fi instead of ./autogen.sh
 and would have avoided the symlink issue, but I didn't check whether
 autoreconf passes on valgrind tip.

 Disabling the patches was the right thing to do as I pushed them all
 upstream, and all got merged indeed.

 So what I roughly recall I did last time:
   svn export -r somerev
   autoreconf -fi or so to bootstrap autotools files
   ./configure
   make BUILD_ALL_DOCS=no dist
   (make distcheck doesn't pass and was hard to fix)

 then uupdated to the new tarball.

 The BUILD_ALL_DOCS=no disables some docs because the build was broken
 due to some pdftex regression; I discovered a workaround later in the
 form of using the attached pdftex.def on your local machine. See
 Debian #566591; this seems fixed properly now.

 I prefer rolling a tarball because I find it painful to cleanup after
 autogen.sh in debian/rules, and I don't like shipping autofoo files in
 the .diff.gz, but your approach is valid as well.