@arbrandes now that I learned that youtube transcript import is broken for the forseeable future, I went looking for other ways to deal with transcript importing. I observed the same thing as @Jimmy_Wu, but then I did another test:
First I created a completely different class, edited the file in place, and then uploaded the tar.gz to the 2nd class. But it showed no change. Suspicious that this might have to do with both classes using the same video ID, I made a change in the 1st class’s transcript and refreshed the second class, and indeed it changed too. This showed that video IDs are treated as unique but also shared between classes, and thus need to be changed between classes.
I went and did a find and replace on the unique ID used in the .srt file (0eabdd4c-5be9-4876-88e6-75d4384696dc in Jimmy’s example above would also correspond to the video ID) I found that if I changed the file name from 0eabdd4c-5be9-4876-88e6-75d4384696dc-en.srt to e.g. foobar-en.srt, and then changed 0eabdd4c-5be9-4876-88e6-75d4384696dc everywhere to foobar (it seems to show up only in a file like course/vertical/b63cdf2a9bde418db24e426823344516.xml), then the first time I uploaded it over a test course, it seems to correctly get its own transcript file. However, if I then make another edit to that foobar-en.srt file, and import the updated tar.gz over the existing 2nd class content, the change does not appear.
This suggests to me that the import process is doing some sort of “does this video ID already exist? If so, don’t update it” type check (which explains both Jimmy’s observations, and mine). Do you know if this is accurate?
(If so, it would suggest in order to store things in a repository I’d also need some script which would re-randomize all video IDs before import. That wouldn’t work for me, since I need a human-readable name for transcript files like foobar-en.srt so that people can know which one corresponds to the transcript they want to fix. Also, deleting and recreating the class on every transcript update wouldn’t be viable, because I’d lose all the forum posts & grades etc)