Sometimes you need tighter control over what does not go into the
distribution; for instance, you might have source files that are
generated and that you do not want to distribute. In this case
Automake gives fine-grained control using the dist and
nodist prefixes. Any primary or _SOURCES variable can be
prefixed with dist_ to add the listed files to the distribution.
Similarly, nodist_ can be used to omit the files from the
distribution.
As an example, here is how you would cause some data to be distributed while leaving some source code out of the distribution:
dist_data_DATA = distribute-this
bin_PROGRAMS = foo
nodist_foo_SOURCES = do-not-distribute.c