Your licence should be more precise because you cannot put a CC licence on the legal texts, just on your ReadMe file.
French civil code now on GitHub
81–90 of 126 posts
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#82What does this offer on top of Legifrance? http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_fr/index_en.htm (I don't know any French and don't know the particulars of French legal system that much, so I cannot really assess quickly based on what I can find in the net).
Isn't that obvious? Pull Requests! Can you imagine a democracy editing its laws through pull requests and code review?
...where regional committers are elected, and once elected, act in blocs against their electorate?
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> The maintenance burden seems horrific unless you can pull it automatically
Which is probably relatively easy, legifrace provides reconciliated articles with history so it should be possible to just crawl the code, see if an article was updated since the last crawling and generate the relevant commits.
> and even then the actual benefit of using Github is not so clear to me.
Diffs are somewhat more straightforward than the equivalent legalese, and version-controlled markdown makes for easier programmatic manipulations across "space" and time than a custom-designed website.
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#84I just woke up and wow. Well, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have of course.
How does it feed the data to the repo? Is it parsing reports from the parliament? If yes, how smooth did the process go?
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#85Couldn't this have been done without taking gay marriage as the first example? Or does IT always need to go hand in hand with unconditional progressism?
Gay marriage (or "marriage for everyone") is a recent, substantial change to a law that is familiar to many French people. I thought it was a great example despite its somewhat controversial nature.
It also highlights the replacement of certain terms rather well as far as examples go.
Seems like the perfect example to me.
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#86Do they accept pull requests if I find any bugs?
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#87Legal 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…
Does it also work out the consequential's
By that i mean if law x is changed to say "blah blah blah" that means that law Y no longer applies and law Z is changed to say "foo bar bobbins"
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#88I just woke up and wow. Well, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have of course.
How does it feed the data to the repo? Is it parsing reports from the parliament? If yes, how smooth did the process go?
It goes on each article on Legifrance, creates a JSON file with all the articles, which book/section they belong to, and for each article, tracks it's versions (they are dates). The crawler is in Go.
Then there is a python script that takes that JSON file, creates the .md files and runs the git commands in the shell.
Ultimately the sad thing is that I had to scrape this information. There were lots of pitfalls due to bad formatting and so on... Well, scraping.
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#89This would be a great idea in general for the legislature of any country, to be able to see exactly how and when the law was changed would be valuable for transparency and also research. Commit messages could reference transcripts of the debates surrounding changes.
The executive wouldn't like it :-)
As one of the candidates for the speaker of the House of commons said to me "the executive can get a way with a lot" in terms of controlling the order paper and timing
Stil think Parmjit would have made a better speaker than Bercow
Re: French civil code now on GitHub
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The maintenance burden seems horrific unless you can pull it automatically Which is probably relatively easy, legifrace provides reconciliated articles with history so it should be possible to just crawl the code, see if an article was updated since the last crawling and generate the relevant commits. > and even then the actual benefit of using Github is not so clear to me. Diffs are somewhat more straightforward t…
Right, that makes sense then.