[Open-Legislation] French civil code on git

Wed Apr 8 11:20:12 UTC 2015

2015-04-08 12:09 GMT+01:00 stef <s at ctrlc.hu>:
>
>
> what are you arguing here? that you find stuff easier with github, than
> with
> a search engine? would you do so if no one sent a mail about this project?
>
>
Yes - because I have never stumbled across diff-level analysis of the Civil
Code.

i guess this topic demands a bit more than 5 minutes. maybe erik will fill
> you
> in. but this wants to be a tool for exactly this purpose that git is abused
> for by some people. of course it's not a consumer-grade, and agreed i'd
> never
> touch it myself. but then i don't want to whatever the unclear goals of
> doing
> so are.
>
>
If you don't recommend it, then I won't bother wasting any further time on
it - 5 minutes was clearly too much. I don't expect to understand something
in 5 minutes, but 5 minutes is a good amount of time to judge whether
something is going to lead *anywhere* without considerable effort. The lack
of updating of the site (since 2013) the lack of any reasonable
documentation, examples and the lack of clarity as well as the very limited
amount of material on the site all suggest it is useless as it stands
without a lot more work.

You are the one who suggested it not me.

> well, yes, it's something i wouldn't poke with a 42 foot stick, but still,
> if
> you're looking for a tool, this should be it i believe. or regardscitoyens
> visualisation tool for amendments, if you are in a sad situation as the
> french
> with their patch amendments.
>
>
UK legislation is very very much more difficult to work with than the patch
amendments mentioned above. But we do not yet have a complete accurate
machine-readable corpus of up-to-date legislation, though it has been
promised soon, as a result I haven't been putting a lot of effort into
thinking about the informatics until that comes to pass.

Many jurisdictions have the same, or worse, in terms of formatting of
amendments, but most that do also spend money on maintaining a codified
version, we haven't done so.

> what exactly is your goal?
>
>
Read legislation in a simple and clean way and see how it has changed over
time (i.e. amendments). If there are other ways to do it, then great.

raw data? you know, the french senate does postgres dumps. much better
> format
> for datahandling. also useful for offline hand, and quite mature framework
> and
> software.
>

But also requiring a bit more effort to read.

I know a lot more people who can read github (or any other web based git
repository such as bitbucket) than can put together SQL queries to read
material from a database dump. Sure, I can do both quite happily but I am
untypical as lawyers go.

> did you ever put legislation into github?
>

No. It would not be sensible to try to do for the UK for reasons I have
expressed.

-- 
Francis Davey
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