[texhax] commands within sections in multi-author document

[Joe Corneli]

I'm working on editing a fairly huge tex document (will be approx.
1800 pages long) written by a few hundred people. Each of the
sections originally had its own unique preamble, but I've collected
and sorted the information in these preambles and made one (giant)
preamble.  This is allowing me to take a first pass through the
document and fix latex bugs.  But I've had to make some compromises,
as you can well imagine (choosing one alternative among various
commands with a certain name).  I was wondering if there is a way to
redefine \newcommand so that it is only active within each TeX
section. If I could do this, then next time I do this, I'd have a
lot less to sort through, and there wouldn't be the same name-space
conflicts among the commands (of course, I'd want to make sure to
change all \def commands etc. into the redefined
\newcommand). Advice?