gnulib and missing distribution files?

[Karl Berry]

In trying to prepare the release of (gasp) GNU Hello, I'm finding that
some gnulib files are being left out of the distribution tar.gz,
specifically the getopt-related ones.  It looks like this is because the
gnulib Makefile.am just has:

libgnu_a_SOURCES =
libgnu_a_LIBADD = @LIBOBJS@
noinst_HEADERS =
pkgdata_DATA =
EXTRA_DIST =

And the system getopt on the machine where I'm working already suffices,
so it's not included in LIBOBJS.  But obviously (?) it should be
included in the distribution.

This can't be a new problem, but I didn't find anything about it in the
mail archives.  I looked at some of the other gnulib-using sources
(thanks to users.txt) but didn't see a solution there, either.  What do
others do?  

BTW, the actual error comes from xgettext at make distcheck:
/usr/local/gnu/bin/xgettext: error while opening "gnulib/lib/getopt.c" for 
reading: No such file or directory
since I included gnulib/lib/getopt.c in POTFILES.in, since it has
strings ... however, regardless of that, surely the getopt files need to
be included or the package wouldn't build on any system lacking GNU
getopt.

Thanks,
Karl