Is the idea that the commits themselves are also time stamped with the date of the legislation/amendment too?
Yes
Spanish legislation as a Git repo
11–20 of 246 posts
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#12Great project.
For others wondering, while most of the Franco-era laws were nuked in 1978, this does include lots of old laws (ie pre-20th C).
However, the source material starts with a sqashed commit in 1960 :) So no changelog before that. The BOE source though is pretty phenomonal, they've scanned files going back to the 1600s so far.
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#13This is great. Compare it to British legislation which is frankly a mess of patches. Example picked fairly much at random, this law was originally passed in 1990 and has been "patched" regularly:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/9
Laws being passed are these ludicrous sets of patches:
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#14This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.
> There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.
There really, really are.
The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable.
You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]?
Well, lawyers know just as well or better how to butter their bread; and they will pull out every dirty trick they have to scupper attempts to make practising law more transparent or efficient in any way.
0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/tax-prep-companies-...
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#15This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.
I would like to have a legal advisor based on that. At least for a first question, qithout paying a lawyer
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#16I built a pipeline that converts all Spanish state legislation into version-controlled Markdown. Each law is a file, each reform is a real git commit with the historical date. 8,642 laws, 27,866 commits. The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and replace with...", you get an actual diff. The repo is the product. Browse any law, git…
cool idea, how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go? Just thinking how this could maybe used for (automated) research / visualization on the evolution of (spanish - in this case) law
> how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go
Looking at the commit dates (which seem to be derived from the original publication dates) the history seems quite sparse/incomplete(?) I mean, there have only been 26 commits since 2000.
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#17This is really great, anyone know of a Dutch version?
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#18Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#19for france there is https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo
#20Great idea! I hope you did something like:
$ git commit --amend --author="Author Name " --no-edit
Then, it would be simply amazing to run gource, sit back, and watch where all the noise is coming from.
Gource:
https://github.com/acaudwell/gource
What gource looks like:
I’ve long wanted to see gource applied in other sociologically-relevant contexts and this’d be a real good one ..