Re: Maintaining historical data in a git repo

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 22:39, Yuval Adam [off-list ref] wrote:

However, we perceive git as a very powerful tool, that can fit
beautifully with the way legislation works today.
The challenge for us - should we choose to accept it ;) - is to build
a set of wrapper tools that allow us to use git in such a way, while
enabling us to build up past history.

You can always solve this by having two repositories, you have one
canonical Git repository with your laws using some text-based format
to describe when each change was added.

You'd never rewrite the history of this repository since it would
represent the history of your project to give a commit timeline to the
law, and not attempt to make your commit log reflect changes in the
law.

You could then have tools to export another Git history from that
original repository, that one would be constantly rewritten and nobody
would base changes on that.

You could also make the two one and the same, but you don't have to.