Yes, we are one of those projects that wants it to be possible to build python without having the tools that generate build artifacts.  You will note that we also check in build artifacts that are produced by our own python scripts, to avoid the problem of trying to build python when you don't yet have a python.

Please use the same version of autotools as were used to generate the current files.  Upgrading autotools is done in a separate PR that only does the upgrade (and I don't know how we decide when to do that...)

Actually, you could just generate the PR with the changes to the source files, not the build artifacte, for the initial review.