What's the use of core/*/qa/unoapi/knownissues.xcl files?

Hi devs,

Some qa subdirs have a unoapi/knownissues.xcl in it, e.g.
http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sc/qa/unoapi/knownissues.xcl
It seems that it contains a list of issues/bugs related to classes.

I could not find where these files are actually used.
Should they be removed?

On a related note: The issue numbers in those files look like: i84702.
I presume this references some old OpenOffice bugtracker.
Is there any way of accessing the descriptions of these old bugs?
I was looking for the history of a function in LO and it dated back to the
OO era (2008). The commit message was quite non-descriptive of the
reasons for the change, it just mentioned such a bug number. It would
be useful to have the bug info for exploring the code in its context.

Maarten