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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

It really doesn't.

In software, you need to track versions because you keep everything in multiple files, and you're making changes to multiple files, and you can have regressions with each new version.

In a negotiated legal document, you have just the one authoritative version: the offer you've sent to the other party (or the counter-offer they've sent back to you). For lawyers, this takes the form of edits to the document as highlighted by the Track Changes feature. (Prior versions are basically irrelevant except for historical interest.) And even then, the document going back and forth isn't even the executed (aka "production") document, it's just the development version. Once the document is executed, the development versions get deleted because the executed document is the only truth legally and so prior versions absolutely do not matter.

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One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document, and of the release version as an executed document. In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either, they're just helpful for anyone willing to gain an insight on why the things work the way they do.

One can equally think of the entire code base as a single document

No, you literally can't. They're separate files. A legal agreement is just one document. It makes a world of difference for version tracking.

Also, software has versions. If you have an issue, you can just rollback to a working version. Legal agreements don't have multiple working versions. They just have the one, and you don't get to update it, because if you change it, you have a different agreement that supersedes all old copies, which are now longer worth the paper they're printed or or the bytes that store them.

Sure, you could have needlessly more complicated version tracking for legal documents. But Track Changes in Word works fine, because the legal field doesn't need anything more complicated.

I literally can think of the entire code base as a single document. It happens to be multiple records in a database, but that's not intrinsic to it.

In the same way, i can literally think of my legal documents as a single document (say, a visa application) with multiple files (say, a petition, a copy of my wedding certificate and a reference from a friend). [Ironically, this language is precisely the reverse of what you would say with the printed copies.]

When they're printed out you can't tell what the boundaries are. Don't get confused by the implementation and the abstract concepts. If there's a distinction that doesn't work well, you can change it. Maybe version 2035 of Word stores every paragraph in a separate file inside a zip archive. There's no reason Generic Version Control System 2038 couldn't be written to peak inside those archives.

A legal agreement is one document, sure. But a large scale legal operation like a sale of a company must consist of thousands of documents that are changing in concert, right? Wouldn't that be a case for a more comprehensive and consistent change control process?

No, the sale of a company is governed by the one sale agreement.

manifest as one singular physical "file" with nothing incorporated by reference? Interesting.

That is correct. Nothing can be incorporated by reference. The closest you can get are attachments which must be incorporated by the time the document is executed.

This. Other versions of a proposed contract floating around a deal do more harm than good.

Ideally, settled issues should remain settled as remaining outstanding issues are resolved during the deal-making process.

But, this is a western tradition/convention, Asian deal-makers seem to be more than happy to look back and re-open settled issues, driving American lawyers insane.

If the legal field doesn’t need anything more complicated, I suppose you think this Git repo is a pointless novelty, not something that would actually be really useful if it were available and authoritative for all statutes?

We're talking about two very different things: a single legal agreement vs a database of laws.

Something like this already exists in multiple forms because it is very useful. It's so useful that the owners of those sites can charge lawyers a lot of money for access... Hundreds of $ per month.

They wouldn’t be able to charge so much if the laws were published using a machine-readable version control system. Citizens should expect this from their legislature; lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to paywall historical information about public laws. This Git repo is a good illustration of how easily the legislature could solve an important legal problem with free software engineering tools that facilitate reuse and permissionless innovation, rather than leaving companies to solve it with crappy paywalled web apps that contractually prohibit reuse of their content.

> In the long run the non-release repository states don't matter that much either

That's not true. Many a times I needed to comb through old commits for debugging purposes.

Also, with multi-branch development, you often have many non-release branches that are relevant at a specific point in time.

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