What is the purpose of the garbage (files) that Qt Creator auto-generates and how can I tame them?
Not a fully answer to your question, but just part of it :) Also, it's googlable.
Guess that if you develop in C++, you should know what does Makefile stand for. Also I think the .loc file is generally a file with localized strings / content.
(source: thelins.se)
Comparing the C++ build system to the Qt build system, you can see that the C++ build system, (the gray boxes), are left unmodified. We are still building C++ code here. However, we add more sources and headers. There are three code generators involved here:
The meta-object compiler (moc in the illustration) – the meta-object compiler takes all classes starting with the Q_OBJECT macro and generates a moc_*.cpp C++ source file. This file contains information about the class being moc’ed such as class name, inheritance tree, etc, but also implementation of the signals. This means that when you emit a signal, you actually call a function generated by the moc.
The user interface compiler (uic in the illustration) – The user interface compiler takes designs from Designer and creates header files. These header files are then included into source files as usual, making it possible to call setupUi to instanciate a user interface design.
The Qt resource compiler (rcc in the illustration) – The resource compiler is something we have not talked about yet. It makes it possible to embedd images, text files, etc into your executable, but still to access them as files. We will look at this later, I just want to include it in this picture where it belongs.
I hope this illustration clarifies what Qt really does to add new nice keywords to C++. If you are curious – feel free to read some of the generated files. Just don’t alter them – they are regenerated each time you build your application.
If you are using QtCreator, the moc files are generated in the debug and release sub-directories of your project directory. The uic files are stored in the root of the project directory. The rcc files are generally boring, but I’m sure that you can find them in your project directory hierarcy somewhere.
Edit: You don't have to include these files into your SVN. This is pretty the same crap as commiting .ncb, .pdb and other temporary files. Every time you change something in your Qt application, these temporary files get regenerated as an update to your changes, so there is no sense to commit them to SVN.
You can tell qmake (and therefore QtCreator) to put the generated files elsewhere by adding the following to your .pro file for the project
UI_DIR = .ui
MOC_DIR = .moc
OBJECTS_DIR = .obj
This would put all ui files in the .ui directory, moc files in the .moc director and all .o files in the .obj directory. (Of course you can change these as you like)
The relevant help for qmake is at: http://doc.qt.io/archives/4.6/qmake-variable-reference.html#moc-dir
If you use shadow builds (enabled by default in the Qt Creator 2.0 beta) then all of these temporary files are created in a separate folder. For example:
\MyProjects\ProjectFoo
\MyProjects\ProjectFoo-build
Very useful IMHO.