This will result in smaller and cleaner tarballs for distributions to use.
Additionally it is a logical step towards moving fully to the Meson build system.
While the last release provided two tarballs (one generated with
Autotools and one with Meson), the next release will only provide a
Meson-generated tarball.
These attributes are respected by `git archive` and `meson dist` which
means they will take effect for the Meson generated tarballs and the
GitHub autogenerated tarballs as well.
As a consequence of switching to `meson dist`, pre-generated files like
`configure` will no longer be included in the tarballs. Users and
distributions that still wish to use the Autotools build system from
these tarballs will now need to run `./bootstrap.sh` or `autoreconf -fi`
themselves, which requires automake, autoconf, and libtool to be
installed.
Since many distributions are slowly dropping the usage of vendor
generated tarballs and are moving to checking out git tags this should
not be a problem.
Arch Linux is for example doing
`source=("git+https://github.com/user/project.git#tag=v1.2.3")` and
Debian has the `git-buildpackage` too. So both of them require require
autoreconf already.
Autotools support might be removed entirely in a future
release since I find them much easier to edit and maintain.
