There is really two questions here.
1) should minification be done by hand or done as part of a build?
2) should the minified files be version controlled?
I”m trying to define a go forward path for the current project that i’m working on. I’ve done some speed evaluations and I believe that my current site could have big performance improvements with just adding some compression / minification.
Here is the basic setup
IBM Commerce 6.0
a ton of large js files (nothing has been minified or compressed)
a ton of large css files (nothing has been minified or compressed)
As part of the build. That way you can’t forget to do it. You don’t usually need minified code in the development environment, you can build by hand if you find you need to debug problems that only reveal themselves in minified code.
You can test the minified code on your staging server.
Not by your source control. If you have an archive of historic build artefacts then they should be part of that.