autogen.sh removes files from intl

["BASS, Ned" <nbass shl com>]

Whenever I compile gnome-libs from CVS, the autogen.sh script seems to
obliterate the contents of the gnome-libs/intl direcotry.  For example,
while the configure script is running, I get the following errors:

[snip]
sed: can't read ./intl/po2tbl.sed.in: No such file or directory
[snip]
sed: can't read ./intl/Makefile.in: No such file or directory
[snip]
linking ./intl/libgettext.h to intl/libintl.h
configure: error: ./intl/libgettext.h: File not found
[snip]

The contents of gnome-libs/intl ends up containing:

drwxr-xr-x   2 ned      users        1024 Feb  9 19:04 ./
drwxr-xr-x  25 ned      users        2048 Feb  9 19:04 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 ned      users           0 Feb  9 19:04 Makefile
-rw-r--r--   1 ned      users          41 Feb  9 19:03 VERSION
-rw-r--r--   1 ned      users           0 Feb  9 19:04 po2tbl.sed

I have the following versions:

Slackware 3.4
Linux 2.0.36
autoconf 2.13
automake 1.4
libtool 1.2d

To get around this, I keep a good copy of the intl module around.  Then
after running autogen.sh in gnome-libs, I copy the contents of the _good_
intl directory into gnome-libs/intl, and then I run the configure script
again.  After that, compilation works fine.  Is there a better way to fix
this?