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German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#121

Post by arlort »

Shacklz wrote: post #118
arlort wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and how is bipartisan consensus is being achieved in real-time This is a horrible idea in practice because everything that is public and open turns into a purity test. You need people to be able to negotiate with each other in order for consensus to be established, and negotiations only work if the negotiators give up on something that they want to get something else. The moment you make this public all that you ge…

> As a matter of fact I'm of the opinion politics everywhere would be a lot better if plenaries, committees and hearings were not recorded or televised in the first place. At that point we might as well get rid of the press, as otherwise someone might be able to hold someone actually accountable to their actions and decisions. Taking the argument ad absurdum, might even go back to monarchy so we don't have to deal wi…

> At that point we might as well get rid of the press, as otherwise someone might be able to hold someone actually accountable to their actions and decisions

Minutes are a thing, you know? And I'm not saying all sessions need to be held behind close doors, I'm perfectly fine with journalists or the public being present

> _must_ have a way of knowing who is doing what, who is involved in which decision

They do, that's what elections, roll calls and minutes are for

> and what favors are being traded

You're implying this is actually possible, it's not. Favours will always be traded in secret and deals made. All that the radical transparency proposals do is making sure that compromises can't be done effectively in official settings

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#122

Post by eru »

codedokode wrote: post #117
eru wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code bases have a lot of cross-references as well. Perhaps the most easily described is 'jump to definition'. But that's handled by your IDE/editor together with language specific tooling, and has nothing to do with git. Why should legal texts be any different as far as git is concerned?

Git/github doesn' provide "Go to definition" and original post was about uselessness of committing law texts into git.

Let's leave github out of the discussion. That's a completely different beast. (And funny enough, github does provide 'go to definition' for some languages.)

So my point was that git is obviously useful for source code of programs.

And as you point out, git does not provide 'go to definition' for source code of programs.

Hence I suggest that the inability of git to provide cross-references in legal text is about as relevant (or rather irrelevant) to the discussion at hand as git's inability to provide cross-references is source code.

Does this make sense?

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#123

Post by eru »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #53
codedokode wrote: post #35

I remember reading about someone simply adding legal texts to git. This is pretty much useless. I think that people who do this never saw a commercial legal database (or how it is called). What one usually need, is for example, to have cross-references, i.e. when a law contains phrase like "the certification is issued by a relevant authority", you want to have the "relevant authority" wrapped in a hyperlink pointing…

I have once used git to track proposed changes to existing legal texts - it was very helpful for that already.

I think the main thing you'd want to do to make git useful for human readable text, like laws or a novel, is to put each sentence on its own line.

By default, git's diff and merge want lines-of-code to be meaningful and are set up for that.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#124

Post by throwaway290 »

amai wrote: post #87
mrweasel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

These wordings are basically a manual description of a diff. They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. I actually think version control is an absolute necessity for laws.

> They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws.

So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool.

In reality both have can be used, commits to see what changed by whom and wordings that says what changed

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#126

Post by jraph »

couscouspie wrote: post #116
jandinter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain a repository with all German legal acts which is up to date: https://github.com/jandinter/gesetze-im-internet I scrape the official website ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de ) once a week. The repository contains the "official" XML files with a formatting that is more focussed on presentation than on the logical structure of the legal acts, unfortunately ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/dtd/1.01/gii…

What did you tell him about your use case? I'm asking as I don't agree on the underlying assumption a use case was needed. I consider the value of transparency and public information for a democratic society as evident.

The question might not have been about the transparency, but more about the choice of having it as a git repository, or whether there are actual tools based on the git repository. Arguably, the git repository is unusable for the majority of people, so it cannot be an answer to transparency in itself, some user-friendly tools based on it might.

I'm also interested in the response btw :-)

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#127

Post by account42 »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #62
trashchomper wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you answered your own question... Like I get it, but English is fluid and is it really that far to make the assumptive leap from "git" to "github/lab/service", seems pretty clear what they meant (even if it's not completely/technically/um-actually correct because git != github).

When I read contribution graph I assumed it would be a revision history graph of commits and authors.

Yeah I expected something like https://gource.io/

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#128

Post by plextoria »

throwaway290 wrote: post #124
amai wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These wordings are basically a manual description of a diff. They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. I actually think version control is an absolute necessity for laws.

> They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool. In reality both have can be used, commits to see what changed by whom and wordings that says what changed

> So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool.

No, they only need to start using versioning in order to adopt versioning. Think of an "initial git commit"

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#129

Post by jampekka »

msk-lywenn wrote: post #112
jampekka wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monopoly is live and well with Office, which is their real money maker.

I thought it was Azure now.

Azure is the biggest revenue source, but my guess is (didn't find data) that Office is more profitable.

Although Microsoft is especially good/evil at getting Azure lock-ins and overpriced exclusive deals from e.g. governments.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#130

Post by sofixa »

mrweasel wrote: post #84
nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

Most laws in most civil law countries (there are exceptions, but it's the standard for the main laws) are a fixed law on a topic which then gets updated. So the 2025 version of the Family Code in France is everything included, and if you do a diff with the 2024 version, you'll see which parts were removed/updated/replaced by which new parts (it could be a clarifying word, new contents, changed rules, etc.). Reading it end to end (it's a hefty book, but still) gives you a complete representation of all laws regarding families (marriage, divorce, kids, etc etc).

It's mostly the obsolete system of common law where to have an understanding of what is legal and what isn't, you need to have a spiderweb of random acts (random as in, they don't have to be thematic, so the Chicken Tax Act of 2005 can have provisions on solar panels that replace the previous solar panel legislation form the STOP KILLING OUR COMMUNITIES Act of 1785) that build/replace on one another, sometimes going very far back, with associated precedents that clarify them.

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