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

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!