It seems to fail locally without it:

Version mismatch error.  This is libtool 2.4.6 Debian-2.4.6-2, but the
definition of this LT_INIT comes from libtool 2.4.
You should recreate aclocal.m4 with macros from libtool 2.4.6 Debian-2.4.6-2
and run autoconf again.

Move MAINTAINER up for consistency between packages.

Signed-off-by: Rosen Penev <rosenp@gmail.com>