[jonathanstray]

God no, don't do it in git. Otherwise no one outside of developers will ever look at it, and the whole point (as I understand it) is to bridge the tech, law, and politics worlds. So some of the primary users aren't developers and have probably never seen a command line.

[maradydd]

Right. The current annotation UI, co-ment, does all of its versioning in a database. Distributed version control provides certain advantages over this, ones that we'd like to bring in quickly, but it's vital that we convey our goals to both non-technical and technical audiences.

We're actually partial to darcs for this particular use case (the patch model is closer to how laws are actually amended), which ironically may decrease traction on the command-line since everyone has such a hard-on for git these days. IIRC you can use darcs via git, though.

[Pyrrhuloxia]

There's no conflict here. You can build it on Git/Mercurial/DARCS/whatever and make it easy for those who are capable to use the command-line or their favorite Git GUI, and at the same time have a visual interface that hides all of that under the cover (e.g. creates a branch when you begin editing). The hard part of this would be conflict resolution, but that's already a hard problem for an online editing system like this (and I didn't look at it long enough to see what the solution here is).