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.
Of course, as long as they are still used, they need to
stay. But for historical records, there are the old Git revisions.
Those subdirs text files correspond directly to the old DO_NOT_COMPILE environment
variable option for building any KDE3/Trinity package. The equivalent in cmake is the
-DWITH build option.
Those subdirs files help us examine any cmake converted package to ensure all elements
were converted and there is a corresponding -DWITH option. Sometimes in those conversions
an option gets missed. That is normal and to be expected. Those subdirs text files provide
us a way to double-check ourselves.
Someday, yes, those files could be deleted, but we should preserve them for several
releases until we all are sure that everything builds correctly on many distros. For now
we should not have to hunt through previous GIT/SVN versions to read those files.
Darrell