Automatic debug symbol generation

[JRS]

I was setting up build infrastructure once again when it occurred to
me, hmm, wouldn't it be nice if automake had default targets for
installing symbols?

For example, make install-syms could do objcopy --only-keep-debug on
the binaries and libraries, and put the .debug files in
/usr/lib/debug.

It looks like implementing this is as simple as just patching libs.am
and progs.am, but I have no clue what automake's regression testing
strategy is.  Is there another developer set up and sufficiently
convinced this is a feature worth implementing?  If not, how do I get
started building a dev environment for automake?