[tei-council] working with translation

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Checking whether an English version  of a text is later than the corresponding (e.g.) French one
is not easy. The French translations have been done on 40 different dates over the last 6 years.
As we don't date the English ones (arguably we should start doing so), we have to establish the
date on which they last changed.  Which, I fear, may involve stepping back through every revision,
checking it out, doing an intelligent diff against the current state, and saving the resultant date.

I am inclined to say we should go through the tedious job of doing this (establishing the last date
on which an gloss/desc/remartk changed) and add that date to the source, henceforth promising to change
it if we edit a string.

There are 2529 revisions of the specs directory. I'd propose we write a script
to check them out one by one, and then go through every desc/gloss/remark in 
every *Spec and see on what date we could find the last change. It could be speeded
up, of course, by quickly removing all files where there is no change at all.

My heart starts to fail me. Can anyone take on this scripting task?
--
Sebastian Rahtz      
Director (Research) of Academic IT
University of Oxford IT Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431