The patch in summary is touching both Makefile.in and Makefile.am, probably to avoid autotools rebuild. This treatment is usually reserved for a few selected system packages that cannot have their autotool scripts rebuilt. This _could_ cause maintainermode-driven rebuild (see http://blog.flameeyes.eu/articles/2008/06/13/maintaner-mode ), which is something we should be avoiding as much as possible. Please just patch Makefile.am and/or configure.in/.ac and rebuild autotools, unless you have very good reasons not to.
This package cannot easily have its autotools rebuilt, since some of its directories are missing Makefile.am files. Since the patches only touch Makefile.{am,in} and never configure.ac, I feel that maintainer-mode badness is not worth fixing (after all ./configure will run only once), as that would involve writing the missing Makefile.am files... Feel free to reopen if you think it necessary :-)
