On Wednesday 25 January 2012 12:58:22 pm Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:

[putolin]

> The point of clutter is not so much regarding disk space as it is to
> having extra files that are maybe completely unused. At some point in
> the future it could be confusing what files are still necessary for
> building and which ones just contain information.
> Because everything is still available through the revision system
> anyhow, it should not be necessary to keep these files in the source
> package. In addition the revision system will give you information about
> all the changes made to these files in the past, so you can get even
> more info in that way.
>
> Julius

They are not very big and can aid in packaging.  

I would rather see them deleted _AFTER_ the cmake conversions are completed 
and the packages build and work on most distributions.