Manual manipulation of Sieve files

We have some scripts that take care of some tasks when creating new email accounts, such as creating some
default mail filter rules.

I know Sieve scripts are plain text files, but need to be compiled for use.  I see that you can use seivec to
compile scripts manually, which can help me create .dovecot.svbin which can be placed where needed and
permissioned correctly.  But a couple questions:

* Sieve has the concept of an active script - is this merely whatever is compiled into the .dovecot.svbin file?

* Does dovecot (managesieve) do any other housekeeping when a user sieve script is installed and set as the
active script?  I would need to replicate this manually.

* If the default script is always the same (sorry, for us, the solution isn't global scripts), would it work
to compile that script once, keep the compiled version somewhere and merely copy it into the correct place
for a new user?  Are there issues with this?

* Should we always have the plain text version along with the compiled one for proper managesieve operation
going forward (users can edit their sieve scripts)

Thank you