Newbie: make dist succeeds, make distcheck fails to copy e.g. '../config/compile'

[Roelof Berg]

Hello,

I'm new to automake and for making my open source project 'limereg' 
ready for debian I moved it to Automake. It builds mainly a library and 
an executable, see:

git clone https://github.com/RoelofBerg/limereg.git
./generate-tarball-distro.sh

'make dist' runs very well and its output can be built on a clean 
system, all tests pass, the tarball seems to be perfectly ok. 'make 
distcheck', however, complains about missing files:

prompt$ make distcheck
[...]
  dist-hook
make[3]: Entering directory 
'/home/roelof/devel/limereg/limereg-1.3.1/_build'
for file in ../config/compile ../config/config.guess 
../config/config.sub ../config/depcomp ../config/install-sh 
../config/ltmain.sh ../config/missing; do \
  cp $file limereg-1.3.1/$file; \
done
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/compile': No 
such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/config.guess': 
No such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/config.sub': No 
such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/depcomp': No 
such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/install-sh': No 
such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/ltmain.sh': No 
such file or directory
cp: cannot create regular file 'limereg-1.3.1/../config/missing': No 
such file or directory
Makefile:925: recipe for target 'dist-hook' failed
[...]

A folder named config would be found if there was no '..' in the path, I 
wonder where the '..' comes from. And to be honest, I have no idea what 
is the purpose of this dist-hook build step at all. Automake together 
with libtool is so huge for a newbie ...

Here the folder named config that would be found without '..':
prompt$ ls 
/home/roelof/devel/limereg/limereg-1.3.1/_build/limereg-1.3.1/config
compile  config.guess  config.sub  depcomp  install-sh  ltmain.sh 
missing  test-driver

My toplevel Makefile.am contains:

AUX_DIST = $(ac_aux_dir)/compile $(ac_aux_dir)/config.guess 
$(ac_aux_dir)/config.sub \
$(ac_aux_dir)/depcomp $(ac_aux_dir)/install-sh $(ac_aux_dir)/ltmain.sh \
$(ac_aux_dir)/missing

My configure.ac contains:
AC_SUBST([ac_aux_dir])

Tried automake V 1.14.1 on Debian Sid and Ubuntu 14.10.

Learning automake from scratch is not easy, any help is very 
aprechiated. My search in
forums/manuals/examples/google didn't lead me to a solution yet.

Thanks, Roelof.