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German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
171–179 of 179 posts
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#172There 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…
I think your understanding is that the Act must be the content. But the Act isn't the content, the Criminal Code, Civil Code etc are the content. The Act itself is more like a patch file, with some surrounding metadata (and its own meta version history as proposed legislation gets marked up throughout the process). It could add a new file, but it could also be an edit. But in neither case is it the effective content, it's a description of changes to said content. (The line does get blurred on the initial commit though, because typically the name of the resulting law is the name of the Act that established it).
So you've called out precisely why version control systems present such a useful analog.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always git diff --word-diff, so a website tracking changes in laws in a Git repo could display diffs using that flag by default.
Yes. Or you can write your own diff (and merge) driver and plug it in, git is flexible enough for that. At least in theory. The original idea was mostly to offer that to help with eg tracking of binary formats. I'm not sure this feature is actually widely used enough to have gotten enough polish to be useful. So in practice you might be better off changing your data format slightly, to make lines-of-text a meaningful…
> I'm not sure this feature is actually widely used enough to have gotten enough polish to be useful.
I've seen it useful in enough contexts to tell that yes, it is.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Or you can write your own diff (and merge) driver and plug it in, git is flexible enough for that. At least in theory. The original idea was mostly to offer that to help with eg tracking of binary formats. I'm not sure this feature is actually widely used enough to have gotten enough polish to be useful. So in practice you might be better off changing your data format slightly, to make lines-of-text a meaningful…
> I'm not sure this feature is actually widely used enough to have gotten enough polish to be useful. I've seen it useful in enough contexts to tell that yes, it is.
Nice! Good to know.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
Git is unnecessary here anyway. Git is useful for collaboration of multiple people on the same project. Is law making a collaboration? Typically there is a single person which signs the bill into a law. But there is collaboration during work on the bill, though. But I do not think that people who make laws want to write git commands in the console. They want the GUI (ideally integrated into Microsoft Word). And if we…
Git is useful for a single person, too.
You are right that the default UI of git is intimidating for normal people.
Saying 'relational database' says about as much about how you actually store the data as saying 'json' or 'xml'. Yes, you could use a variant of git that stores all its information in a relation database. (And in a saner parallel universe, git might have used something like sqlite internally, instead of hand-rolling its own formats from scratch.)
But the question of UI is pretty much independent from the question of how you want to store the data.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#176There 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
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…
They are working on an official API to replace Gesetze im Internet. It should be out in the next few weeks according to its developer.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never understood a strong distinction between common law and civil law. Seems like the only difference is that common law is supposed to involve stronger deference to judicial precedent, although clearly it's not absolute.
The main difference is in the role of the courts when it comes to applying the law; in common law, the judge is essentially the highest authority when it comes to enforcement. Unless another law specifically overrides a judge's interpretation of a law, they can make whatever decision they want and it will become "case law". Case law is a sort of pseudo-law that common law judges create when handling cases: it means t…
I understand all that, but overturning precedent is pretty much always an option for common law judges (and even when they don't want to call it overturning precedent, they can just find enough "substantive differences" to call it unrelated), and jurisprudence constante sounds an awful lot like stare decisis with extra steps.
That's why I say there's no strong distinction. They're just like slightly different flavors of the same basic principles.
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can be tracked online for transparency Government and officials will fight to the teeth to avoid accountability and transparency because that's where the money and power is.
Then who voted into law the current accountability and transparency laws?
Do you see much accountability anywhere right now?
Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then what is the official way to get the latest version? I mean… how does the state itself handle those laws or are you telling me that every German court and government agency buys those books?
I'm not sure if they still buy the books, but I know from someone who worked as a judge in Germany, that they personally stopped buying the books only ~5-10 years ago, because they saw that the online availability was good enough now. But my point is that, as far as I know, there is no official version of the final text. The official publications are made in the Bundesgesetzblatt (which had been privatized in the pas…
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