Why enable the dist target?

Let me give two reasons for enabling the dist target. 1. It makes it easier for those without access to the source code repository to provide patches. With a distribution generated by make dist, small modifications to a few Makefile.am files or the configure.ac file are handled by the make command, which propagates only the required updates. As a result, diff'ing produces a patch that is comparable in size to the amount of changes made to source files. 2. It makes it so that anyone with access to the source code repository can generate the same distribution, as the dist target alone specifies what files are to be included. Audit 1.5.6 included files such as auparse/test/test.log, which appear to be files left over from testing. I just wanted to explain why I took the time to send recent patches. John [ramsdell@goo audit-1.5.6]$ cat ac.diff --- /home/ramsdell/a.txt 2007-07-30 07:51:13.000000000 -0400 +++ c.txt 2007-07-30 12:59:59.000000000 -0400 @@ -39,24 +42,22 @@ audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/auparse_test.ref audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/Makefile.am audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/Makefile.in -audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/test2.log -audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/test.log -audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp -audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp1 -audit-1.5.6/auparse/test/tmp2 audit-1.5.6/auparse/typetab.h audit-1.5.6/AUTHORS -audit-1.5.6/autogen.sh audit-1.5.6/bindings/ audit-1.5.6/bindings/Makefile.am +audit-1.5.6/bindings/Makefile.in audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/ audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/auparse_python.c audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/Makefile.am +audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/Makefile.in audit-1.5.6/bindings/python/setup.py audit-1.5.6/ChangeLog audit-1.5.6/compile audit-1.5.6/config.guess +audit-1.5.6/config.h.in audit-1.5.6/config.sub +audit-1.5.6/configure audit-1.5.6/configure.ac audit-1.5.6/contrib/ audit-1.5.6/contrib/avc_snap