Do we expect default ignores when no ignores are defined anywhere?

I was a bit surprised to learn today that if one has no global-ignore
options defined in any of the run-time configs, then Subversion
assumes a default value of "*.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]*
*.a *.pyc *.pyo __pycache__ *.rej *~ #*# .#* .*.swp .DS_Store":

svn_error_t *
svn_wc_get_default_ignores(apr_array_header_t **patterns,
                           apr_hash_t *config,
                           apr_pool_t *pool)
{
  svn_config_t *cfg = config ? apr_hash_get(config,
                                            SVN_CONFIG_CATEGORY_CONFIG,
                                            APR_HASH_KEY_STRING) : NULL;
  const char *val;

VVVVVVVVVV
  /* Check the Subversion run-time configuration for global ignores.
     If no configuration value exists, we fall back to our defaults. */
  svn_config_get(cfg, &val, SVN_CONFIG_SECTION_MISCELLANY,
                 SVN_CONFIG_OPTION_GLOBAL_IGNORES,
                 SVN_CONFIG_DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES);
^^^^^^^^^^

  *patterns = apr_array_make(pool, 16, sizeof(const char *));

  /* Split the patterns on whitespace, and stuff them into *PATTERNS. */
  svn_cstring_split_append(*patterns, val, "\n\r\t\v ", FALSE, pool);
  return SVN_NO_ERROR;
}

#define SVN_CONFIG__DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES_LINE_1 \
  "*.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]* *.a *.pyc *.pyo __pycache__"
#define SVN_CONFIG__DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES_LINE_2 \
  "*.rej *~ #*# .#* .*.swp .DS_Store"
#define SVN_CONFIG_DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES \
  SVN_CONFIG__DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES_LINE_1 " " \
  SVN_CONFIG__DEFAULT_GLOBAL_IGNORES_LINE_2

This seems wrong to me. I'd expect that if I have no global-ignores
defined in any of my runtimes that nothing will be ignored. If we
feel so strongly that these default ignores should be used, why do we
create a default user config with them commented out? This code is
very old however so I wonder if there is not some good reason for this
behavior. Thoughts?

-- 
Paul T. Burba
CollabNet, Inc. -- www.collab.net -- Enterprise Cloud Development
Skype: ptburba