auto-draft clutter

Hi!

I run a recent WP blog. Now, when I export my blog and look in the XML sheet, I find several instances of ‘<wp:status>auto-draft</wp:status>’. I’ve done lots of Googl’ing on the subject, and found out that WP is automatically creating these ‘hidden draft posts’ as soon as you click ‘New post’, just to keep track of it, or something.

However, my main concern is if this — as far as I see it, when the actual post is published — clutter ever cleaned up? In some of the posts regarding this, there was talk about WP automatically cleaning up such ‘sections’ in a certain time after they were created. However, in similar posts there was talk about bugs and hopes about changed behavior in coming versions. I got confused by that reading, so I decided to drop my own concrete post so that experienced/enthusiastic WP users could — hopefully — give me a simple explanation on what’s the real deal here.

So, will these ‘<wp:status>auto-draft</wp:status>’ be cluttering up my SQL database like an accumulating building block, or will they be automatically wiped over time?

When I first discovered this, and it started bothering my half-neurotic mind, I used phpMyAdmin to — manually — search and wipe every section like this. My blog did not turn malfunctioning after this procedure, so it’s obvious that these tag blocks are really just bloat after the actual post is published.