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All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

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Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#61

Post by ABeeSea »

szatkus wrote: post #58
ABeeSea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because it was written to oppress minorities in as many ways as possible. > At the beginning of the 20th century, the President of the Alabama Constitutional Convention, John B. Knox,[12] stated in his inaugural address that the intention of the convention was "to establish white supremacy in this State", "within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution"[7] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_A…

If it's the case shouldn't it be much simpler today?

Alabama never updated parts of their constitution to remove it as they kept losing federal court cases. It just became unenforceable.

For example their constitution still contains language for school segregation and removing voting rights for interracial marriages.

Even when they did make updates. It was in the form of amendments which increase the overall length. Eg, the amendment that lets women vote.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#62

Post by kepler1 »

walshemj wrote: post #57
kepler1 wrote: post #40

When you've got 104 amendments to a constitution that are the governing high level principles of a state, you know you've done something wrong.

Not really constitutions are living documents that have existed for a long time -hundreds of years for older countries like th US and UK. Why would you not expect a lot of changes

A constitution is the high level document that your citizens agree are the foundational principles governing the state. They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can understand at that level and agree to.

They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail.

104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail, to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in concept and agree to as general participants in a society.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#63

Post by ssivark »

carlsborg wrote: post #2

I look forward to the day when constitutional amendments are pull requests.

But they (almost) are! They just have a more involved review process, requiring sign offs from many more people (from a diverse group of representative stakeholders) given what’s at stake. A lot of the process/bureaucracy comes from the scale & scope of what’s being managed.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#65

Post by walshemj »

kepler1 wrote: post #62
walshemj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really constitutions are living documents that have existed for a long time -hundreds of years for older countries like th US and UK. Why would you not expect a lot of changes

A constitution is the high level document that your citizens agree are the foundational principles governing the state. They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can understand at that level and agree to. They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail. 104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail, to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in concept and agree to a…

Not all countries are the same as the USA

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#66

Post by dmurray »

Udik wrote: post #43
gwright wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are just describing the difference between a bill (what is debated and discussed during the legislative process), and the compendium of statutes (or regulations, etc.) that is updated via the legislative process. My understanding is that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is effectively applying a…

> that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed I don't think that's the case in Italy. A bill often takes the takes the form of sequences such as "in the bill n. 1234/05 at the subparagraph 2, the word X is replaced with the word Y." There isn't, to my knowledge, a notion of "document" which the patch is applied to. You…

Doesn't anyone take the job of publishing the derived documents, with all the changes made?

This seems like it should be done by some government department, but if it's not, still a lucrative opportunity for the private sector (surely every lawyer would buy a copy /subscribe to your service).

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#67

Post by progval »

chungy wrote: post #23
frob wrote: post #4

I always love these sort of things. Here's the same for the US constitution: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution As a bonus, this one attempted to backdate the commits in a cyphered way (git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970).

> git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970 More specifically, git dates are unsigned timestamps with an epoch in common with Unix timestamps. The big difference is that Unix timestamps are signed and have no problem whatsoever backdating to 1776.

> git dates are unsigned timestamps

You are thinking of the in-memory representation of the (main) implementation, not the git format itself.

The on-disk/wire format is text representation, encoded in decimal. You can add a minus sign in front of it, git won't crash when parsing it. The implementation will, however, display the wrong date on git log, but it's a bug that git developers are working on.

For example (coincidentally, it is also a constitution):

    $ git init
    $ curl https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/revision/5e8f80061263d818ae3fc6c8d2086b5278f271ea/gitfast/raw/ | gunzip | git fast-import > /dev/null
    $ git show 5e8f80061263d818ae3fc6c8d2086b5278f271e | grep Date
    Date:   Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000
    $ git cat-file -p 5e8f80061263d818ae3fc6c8d2086b5278f271e | grep author
    author State Constitutional Conventions  -5706313200 -0455

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#68

Post by toyg »

kepler1 wrote: post #40

When you've got 104 amendments to a constitution that are the governing high level principles of a state, you know you've done something wrong.

Or that the body politic has a very active life, which might not be a bad thing. I don't know how the Indian constitution is amended, but typically it's the sort of activity that requires large majorities. Isn't it somewhat inspiring, that a country so big could unanimously change its basic rules so often?

Obviously there are questions of whether that unity was real or somewhat manufactured, but still, at face value it's a Good Thing. I'd rather they keep agreeing on amendments than they start disagreeing and disenfranchising from their democratic institutions.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#69

Post by saghm »

ardy42 wrote: post #53
mishraprince wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did think about having correct dates and authors, but then I got lazy and in fact got more focussed on getting all the amendments in place. Now that the core work is done, I'll add corrected dates (perhaps real date + 100 years), authors and committers in one of the later commits. Thanks for reminding!

> I did think about having correct dates and authors, but then I got lazy and in fact got more focussed on getting all the amendments in place. Now that the core work is done, I'll add corrected dates (perhaps real date + 100 years), authors and committers in one of the later commits. Thanks for reminding! How would you even do authorship? These amendments are basically institutional works, with sometimes convoluted…

GP is the person who submitted this story, so I assume they're talking about the Indian Constitution, not the US one. It's possible that their legal system attributes authorship more directly than the US does.

Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits

#70

Post by davchana »

kepler1 wrote: post #62
walshemj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really constitutions are living documents that have existed for a long time -hundreds of years for older countries like th US and UK. Why would you not expect a lot of changes

A constitution is the high level document that your citizens agree are the foundational principles governing the state. They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can understand at that level and agree to. They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail. 104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail, to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in concept and agree to a…

As time passes, new things come, new challenges. For example, computer fraud, health practices, research, nuclear weapons. Each of the new law passed to address any of something like this, is known as amendment. At the same time, any changes are also known as amendments.
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