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French civil code now on GitHub

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Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#61

Post by mpasternacki »

arcatek wrote: post #51
mpasternacki wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this account actually maintained by Bundestag (or other actual piece of state administration), or is it just a mirror? Also, either German law is really mature and stable, or this repository is unmaintained: last commit oin master is Jan 2013. I'd love to see such a repository for the acts in my country, by the way, but the official source is a PDF, and most of the published acts are actually patches to existing (…

It's the same thing in France, but that's why the OP repo is great: you can see the actual change as a usual diff ( https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/0d5337622... ). I'm not sure how they do it, but I guess that it wouldn't be extremely hard to have a small grammar to automatically convert the legalese patch into an actual git patch (most of the time, the sentences which wrap the editions are the sam…

If you have a text version, at least preprocessing and proposing changes could be doable (especially that as far as I know, formal French is quite uniform - but then, it's what I heard from others, all French I actually know comes from a Dexter's Laboratory episode). In Poland, though, the original acts are published as PDFs, and the text extraction itself needs assistance, if it's even possible without OCR: the international agreements that are side-by-side in multiple languages (Polish, other party, sometimes also English) are usually image scans saved as PDFs.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#62

Post by ptaipale »

mackwic wrote: post #58
ptaipale wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: Denmark, Finland, Sweden and presumably others do it already. I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent. I mean, the fundamental responsibility of citizens is to adhere to the law (ignorantia juris non excusat); the fundamental responsibility of government is to make the law available to citizens because it is not reasonable to…

> I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent. Please be kind in your comments. Also, you're wrong ( http://legifrance.gouv.fr/ ), but that's secondary relatively to the harsh tone you had there.

Well, I said "surprised if", not "surprised that".

The eur-lex link I mentioned lists precisely that site (legifrance) for France. But as I don't read French and don't know the particulars, what puzzles me is what is the additional value of putting the same thing in Github. The maintenance burden seems horrific unless you can pull it automatically, and even then the actual benefit of using Github is not so clear to me.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#63

Post by tormeh »

mpasternacki wrote: post #46
thomasbachem wrote: post #13

All German federal laws and regulations are here: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze I do especially like the GitHub avatar: https://avatars1.githubusercontent.com/u/1994383 ;)

Is this account actually maintained by Bundestag (or other actual piece of state administration), or is it just a mirror? Also, either German law is really mature and stable, or this repository is unmaintained: last commit oin master is Jan 2013. I'd love to see such a repository for the acts in my country, by the way, but the official source is a PDF, and most of the published acts are actually patches to existing (…

The Norwegian laws: https://lovdata.no/info/information_in_english

It's a financially independent (it has a "pro" version) non-profit owned by the department of justice and the faculty of law of the University of Oslo. It is an official source and as such laws published there are officially, legally published and it has been that way since 2001. Laws relevant to private citizens are available for free. It's pretty neat.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#64

Post by return0 »

bolaft wrote: post #59
return0 wrote: post #39

Legal documents are particularly bad to place under source control, because most of them already reference the previous code they are replacing. And, since the code is basically readonly what's the point of using github? I think legal documents do need a versioning system, but it would have to take into account the peculiarities of the domain (i.e. have each article as a node and amendments as graph links)

Did you take a look at the repo? It doesn't track new laws, it tracks the entire Code Civil and considers each new law a "commit", so it works perfectly. Here, as an example, the commit/law that legalizes same-sex marriage : https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/b805ecf05... You can clearly see that the "commit/law" changes the wordings of various files to replace "mother and father" by "parents" and "hu…

I see, that indeed looks like a good example. Does it only work for newly changed laws? i couldnt find any other versioncontrolled articles.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#65

Post by stwe »

mpasternacki wrote: post #46
thomasbachem wrote: post #13

All German federal laws and regulations are here: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze I do especially like the GitHub avatar: https://avatars1.githubusercontent.com/u/1994383 ;)

Is this account actually maintained by Bundestag (or other actual piece of state administration), or is it just a mirror? Also, either German law is really mature and stable, or this repository is unmaintained: last commit oin master is Jan 2013. I'd love to see such a repository for the acts in my country, by the way, but the official source is a PDF, and most of the published acts are actually patches to existing (…

I'm the original creator of that repo. Keeping it up to date is unfortunately a time-consuming manual effort. Doing version control downstream is generally a nightmare because unraveling different law changes/typo fixes is complicated (yes, lot's of typos when humans consolidate laws by hand).

If you're interested, here's a talk about it at Git Merge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qql1Ess7qM

Here are some scrapers/scripts around it: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#70

Post by peteretep »

b08aa8b0dcfce wrote: post #66

The README is so full of grammatical and spelling errors it obviously wasn't written by a French speaker. Urgh.

The irony of course being that I thought to myself as I was reading it "that's some mighty easy-to-understand French". A long time ago I used to visit francophone Africans in a UK asylum centre who were always notably easier to understand than the French.
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