Problems with bulding gedit from CVS

[Manish Chakravarty]

Hi all,
I was trying to submit gedit patches. So i downloaded the gedit source
via CVS. 
When i ran autogen.sh in the dir, i got the following error:
---snip---
Checking for required M4 macros...
  gnome-compiler-flags.m4 not found
  libtool.m4 not found
  glib-gettext.m4 not found
  intltool.m4 not found
  pkg.m4 not found
Checking for forbidden M4 macros...
***Error***: some autoconf macros required to build gedit
  were not found in your aclocal path, or some forbidden
  macros were found.  Perhaps you need to adjust your
  ACLOCAL_FLAGS?

auto-apt shows me that these files are indeed present
in /usr/share/alocal.
What do i need to set to get gedit to compile?

In the Ubuntu IRC channel i was suggest to use the Ubuntu source package
and NOT build from CVS.
Is it true that Ubuntu is particularly not suitable for development?
If so, what distro would you recommend for developers?

Regards
Manish

Send instant messages to your online friends http://in.messenger.yahoo.com