On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 at 09:06:40 +0000, PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel wrote:
- they want generated files to be added, especially for Autotools projects In my case as upstream of the hkl library I will have big 3D models, I just want to distribute them in the tarball but not track their history in the git repository.
Yes, that's another valid use-case for upstream source releases that are not a 1:1 copy of what's in upstream git: the source release might be a combination of more than one upstream project, including both source code whose history needs to be tracked, and non-code files that are inconveniently large for git and have a less interesting history. (Not necessarily *generated* files, either: perhaps they're from a separate upstream repository, or perhaps their actual content is stored out-of-band using git-annex or git-lfs or similar, or perhaps upstream doesn't record their history at all because they're only added and rarely or even never subsequently edited, as is common for game assets.)
smcv