Remove and ignore auto-generated files

[h3xx]

Get them back by running ./autogen.sh on a system with GNU autotools installed.

[h3xx]

Note: The reason I'm doing this is because I have a version 0.8.1 tarball available, and I want a cleaner repo before I submit a PR to add those changes (lots of updates to auto-generated files that muddy up the commit).

• 0.8.1 upgrade with these files here: 34 files changed, 3694 insertions(+), 2919 deletions(-)
• 0.8.1 upgrade without these files here: 25 files changed, 90 insertions(+), 69 deletions(-)

[mok0]

Running autogen.sh that you have added requires that you have autotools installed on your machine. Normally, distributed software contains a complete configure system so you can compile and install the software simply by going configure; make; sudo make install.

[h3xx]

You're right. It is common practice to include these files in a release tarball. That's different than removing the auto-generated files from source control. It's possible to generate those files and add them to a release tarball using GitHub Releases.

However, it isn't common practice to keep generated files in source control. The reason for this is threefold:

1. Deliberately keeping autogenerated files adds extra steps to development effort, which are likely to be forgotten.

Say I change one line in configure.ac now I have to run autoreconf just so I can commit.

2. When someone checks in a change, it makes it less obvious what the change does.

(Imagine the same scenario as before: a single-line change to configure.ac) Say I run a different version of autotools than the one the last committer used, now the file is generated differently and my commit now has 1000 lines of changes I didn't make by hand. It's not so obvious now that I just intended to change the one line.

3. It leads to extra development effort to maintain the extra files.

Say you're coordinating with a team running an ancient version of autotools, and they check in a change and run autoreconf just as they should, but something went wrong with the output and it now won't run configure due to a missing macro. Now it's up to you to fix it. >:-E

TL;DR A good rule of thumb is: If you didn't write it by hand, don't check it in to source control.

[mok0]

I see your point, I will take a closer look at your pull request. Thanks!