You are correct -- it is newer. This would be a bug in kdevelop's automake scripts.
Linking to your actual bug report would have been helpful.
Here's the report where they tell you they're not going to fix that version of KDevelop since it's too old, uses KDE3, and is unmaintained. This implies the existence of a newer kdevelop that
is maintained and uses KDE4. Time to upgrade your desktop to KDE4. Or downgrade automake to 1.6.x.
This is
far from the first time automake has flagrantly broken itself, though. It's also
bloated itself beyond dreams of bloat. You might be better off with makefiles and
DDD than an all-singing all-dancing automake-based monstrosity. Automake does to make what MS Word does to HTML.