This repo is for the German Basic Law, automatically generated from this other repo. You'll find there their toolchain too - if you cannot find a good translation, ask.

The German Basic repo Law is interesting because it is MD - Markdown.

I'm from Victoria, Australia, and our laws are recorded as Microsoft Word documents, but distributed as Word docs or PDFs. Generally, they have associated "amendments" within the current document.

"Current and superseded versions of Acts and statutory rules incorporating any amendments that have been made." from

Legislation in force https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force

So, it appears the "repo" concept is modeled on the concept of a website, with history of amendments, with associated pdfs sourced from Word documents.

Essentially, a "pile of files" with an index maintained in HTML, and an associated search tool.

Also, note that there is a "Historical" entry from 1851 to 1995. The mid 90's was a time when Microsoft Word was used more and more. There was also a large effort to convert computer systems documentation to word documents. Of course, much was simply in either print, or in people's heads.

Dear Fossil Community,

I'm writing on behalf of the Parliament of my country. It has finally become clear to both the Lawmakers and the indigenes that the Parliament is unable to manage the preparation and review of new laws in a concise and reasonable manner. Whatever is proposed becomes a mess - both new laws and amendments to the existing laws. Almost any patch becomes barely identifiable; its timestamps, status and Respectful Authors are blurred and shaded. The situation becomes particularly miserable for the cases when the law under consideration has to look meaningful to the indigenes. In these cases the Lawmakers have to work hard to prepare a patch that is readable but in the same time is free from contradictions. Such efforts are very tedious and heroic but usually unsuccessfool.

Fortunately the is a new hope to overcome the above-mentioned troubles. This new hope is Fossil. It was thoroughly considered during the Parliament's secret assembly and it has been decided that the lawmaking procedures must be based on this solid and perspective system.

Unfortunately there are no programmers in the Parliament who could teach the colleagues to use Fossil. In fact the are very few programmers left in the whole country and those remaining might not last for long. So the Parliament ruled to request Fossil's community to assist with the wide-scale deployment and the long-term support. This work will be payed generously from the national funds. All skillful Fossil users will be considered favorably with no constraints on gender, age, race, citizenship or preferred text editor.

The Parliament have not yet obtained the permission from the Secret Service to disclose a relevant contact information. But an intelligent person is believed to be able to deduce this information from what is already written above. So please make your guess and apply ASAP!

It's just gone 4pm where I am, but it must still be before noon somewhere else :-)

it's any time right now somewhere ... just the place on earth need to be determinated to match and make that statement true

seeg wrote on 2020-12-14 04:37:20:

... issuing law acts seems to me mostly like adding/removing/editing specific laws or their details.

That is fairly often true. And legislative bodies can even pass patch sets as law.

Here's a really clear example I use to illustrate your point: the Règlement général sur la protection des données (RGPD) interprets the GDPR as an enormous patch set against multiple existing laws. These ranged from a 1978 privacy law to partial implementations of the GDPR that had been passed two years previously.

That was a reasonable solution because:

• they had run out of time and it had been long-since agreed the law would/must be passed by a certain date
• it was unclear legally what would happen if they deleted the law entirely first

However the result was also difficult, because humans are not good at reading a patch set to multiple upstreams. (To be kind to the French legislators, they have made efforts to fix up the mess, but its a great example.) A tool something like Daniel pointed out that the German government uses could have made things a lot clearer.

Git should not be used for this purpose because it cannot find descendants, and legislation is all about the DAG, no matter what country you're looking at. An easy example is the Constitución Española, see the sections "Referencias posteriores" and "Referencias anteriores" that point backwards and forwards. Common-or-garden legislation often has many more references, for example the US Code has a very densely linked manual DAG.

From the doc Fossil v Git:

The difference is that Git stores its objects as individual files in the .git folder or compressed into bespoke key/value pack-files, whereas Fossil stores its objects in a SQLite database file which provides ACID transactions and a high-level query language. This difference is more than an implementation detail. It has important practical consequences.

One notable consequence is that it is difficult to find the descendents of check-ins in Git. One can easily locate the ancestors of a particular Git check-in by following the pointers embedded in the check-in object, but it is difficult to go the other direction and locate the descendants of a check-in. It is so difficult, in fact, that neither native Git nor GitHub provide this capability short of crawling the commit log. With Fossil, on the other hand, finding descendents is a simple SQL query. It is common in Fossil to ask to see all check-ins since the last release. Git lets you see "what came before". Fossil makes it just as easy to also see "what came after".

I agree with you even more strongly when it comes to legal judgements and precedents, which can easily be considered an expansion on the legislation DAG. It gets hideously complicated and is far beyond the scope of a human to hold in their head.

Dan Shearer dan@shearer.org

Git should be used for this purpose because it cannot find descendants

I assume you've missed a "not" from that sentence...

I'm not sure which amuses me more: The foreign request for assistance or the serious reply. :)

Now April fools day has gone, let‘s see how serious that request was

Apart from "unsuccessfool" at the end of the first paragraph, the give-away to me is that while the United Nations rightly campaigns for many Human Rights, "freedom of choice of text-editor" isn't one of them ("with no constraints on gender, age, race, citizenship or preferred text editor.").

Actually the official portal that the Estonian supermafia uses for announcing social demands, propganadistically called "laws", as if those were laws of science like laws of math or laws of physics, does allow diffs. As of 2021_04_04 You may experiment by choosing the different versions from the two drop-down menus at

https://www.riigiteataja.ee/redaktsioonide_vordlus.html?grupiId=153399&vasakAktId=210032016001

The new diff is displayed after pushing the blue button with the text "Võrdle", which translates as "Compare". A non-interactive archival copy by archive.is.

An example with colors. and its noninteractive archival copy by a 3. party.