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Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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 "husband and wife" by "spouses".

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

> i couldnt find any other versioncontrolled articles.

Did you look? All markdown files aside from the readme are articles. Or did you mean articles which were altered after their initial creation? https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commits/master/L... is one, it was added in 1803 and modified in 1986 and 2014.

https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commits/a191667d... is also one, with modifications in 1986, 1987, 2007 and 2013.

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"

No, version control can only handle textual changes, only humans with legal expertise can work out how one law affects another. Even if there was a graph that showed all the links between all the laws (which would take an enormous amount of work to build), it would take a semantic understanding of each modification to deduce whether it has any impact on other nodes.

There are services (external, secondary to the published acts) that published a re-unified, highlighted version. I would imagine a repository that maintains a current unified text, with the "update acts" as commit messages (or even with the original PDFs somehow linked to the commits. I'm sure it can be implemented somehow in Git plumbing. Annotations, maybe?). I'd even pay for this kind of service - but probably not as much as lawyers who need it for their daily work pay for the existing equivalents.

> 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?

The code is not readonly at all, each law within the domain covered by the code is an alteration to the code. Individual laws are reified as commits, and the repository tracks the evolution of the code as laws get voted in and applied.

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