Help! www.debian.org git translation *almost* done, except...

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

Hey folks,

As I hope(!) you're aware, we've been working on moving the website
from CVS to git, and updating a lot of the associated scripts to
match. I thought we were just about done, then we've hit a
surprise. I'm hoping that somebody here can help to explain stuff!

The file french/international/french/desc.wml is the only wml file
which uses perl code to track CVS versions and compare them against
the contents of a translated_txt.db file. Checking that data file, I
can see there are references to files which are mailing list
descriptions, and what looks like some package descriptions for
debian-jr. I think I can see how the code here is working, but is
there anybody around who can please explain to us *why*:

 * If this is useful, why does this only show up in the french
   directory of the webwml tree? 

 * Why are these files managed differently to all of the other files
   in the webwml tree? If other files are written as .wml files with
   translation-check headers, is there some reason why these couldn't
   work the same way?

I'm hoping/assuming there are good reasons for the differences here,
but it's really not obvious! I don't want to wade in and break working
stuff here, but with the move to git we need to understand (and
update) code that's used. I might just be missing it, but I can't see
any documentation here to describe the design...

Thanks!

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have
 nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free
 speech because you have nothing to say."
   -- Edward Snowden