[Inkscape-devel] <title> and <desc>

I'm currently working on making the title and description fields in the Object Properties dialog work (bug 171024). SPObject already had some dummy member functions to get and set titles and descriptions, so I've turned these into working functions. But I see that there are also dummy non-member functions that are supposed to do the same thing. I could easily implement these using the member functions, but it seems like pointless clutter to have both member functions and non-member functions doing the same thing, so I'm tempted just to delete them (they are not used anywhere, except in the macros SP_OBJECT_DESCRIPTION and SP_OBJECT_TITLE, which are themselves unused). Is there any reason to keep the non-member functions?