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Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by Udik on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:15PM (#25894836)
In Italy (and I guess in many other places) laws are effectively commits, not documents/ files. The actual law is often implicit in the result of the successive modifications each new law applies to the existing ones. Which is terrible from a usability perspective- it's like working with lists of patches instead of files.

I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration cycles and having clarity and order as their only concern- have developed solutions and practices that absolutely can and should be applied also to the management of the law.

Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by gwright on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:27PM (#25894947)
I think you are just describing the difference between a bill (what is debated and discussed during the legislative process), and the compendium of statutes (or regulations, etc.) that is updated via the legislative process.

My understanding is that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is effectively applying a patch approved by the legislative process to the repository of statutes.

If you try to dig into a mainstream news story about legislative actions to the actual bill text you'll quickly find that for all but the simplest actions the bill text is useless for understanding the effect of the bill. The problem is that you need the surrounding context of the statute or regulation that is being amended in order to understand. At least for my state and the US federal legislative systems, the web based UI for understanding all this is abysmal.

The cynic in me thinks that legislators don't even understand the true nature of their own legislation. They are making voting decisions based on staff summaries, verbal discussions, media reports, constituent sentiment analysis, etc.

Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by Udik on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:06PM (#25895354)
> that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed

I don't think that's the case in Italy. A bill often takes the takes the form of sequences such as "in the bill n. 1234/05 at the subparagraph 2, the word X is replaced with the word Y." There isn't, to my knowledge, a notion of "document" which the patch is applied to. You can, of course, derive the documents from the successive patches, and laws on new matters contain an entire document as a "first commit". But in software engineering it's the documents/ files you care about, patches and commits only exist as a support for change management.

Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by dmurray on Sunday January 24, 2021 @06:13PM (#25897191)
Doesn't anyone take the job of publishing the derived documents, with all the changes made?

This seems like it should be done by some government department, but if it's not, still a lucrative opportunity for the private sector (surely every lawyer would buy a copy /subscribe to your service).

Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by gwright on Sunday January 24, 2021 @04:00PM (#25895976)
That is interesting. Thanks for elaborating.
Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by zepn on Sunday January 24, 2021 @09:04PM (#25898253)
This is my (basic, lay) understanding of how changes to UK law happen, as well.

For example, here is a collection of "Statement of changes in Immigration Rules: 1994 to 2020": https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-rules-...

If you click on the latest document, "accessible" version, you'll find paragraphs such as the following:

  Changes to the Introduction
  Intro1. In paragraph 6.2, after the definition of “English language course”, insert:
  “ “EU national” in Appendix T5 (Temporary Worker) International
  Agreement Worker means a person who is a national of: Austria, Belgium,
  Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
  Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania,
  Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,
  Slovenia, Spain, or Sweden; and who is not also a British citizen.”.

  Changes to Part 7
  7.1. For the second paragraph 276BB1(vi)(d), substitute:
  “(e) the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the
  Department for International Development or the Foreign, Commonwealth
  and Development Office has determined should qualify for relocation under
  the ex-gratia redundancy / resignation package, including confirmation that
  they served ‘on frontline duties outside the wire in Helmand’.”.
Anyone interpreting this law (i.e. lawyers) does not have the "latest" version to hand; they have to stack successive changes.

There are other complications, which I can't recall, but I dearly wish someone would do this for UK law.

Re:All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git co... by gwright on Sunday January 24, 2021 @10:22PM (#25898666)
Fascinating. Is there nothing in the UK like the US Code?

https://www.govregs.com/uscode