The README told people to clone. For anyone adapting this to their own parliament
that is wrong: they cannot push, so their work is stranded on one machine, and
pulling in later updates is awkward. docs/YOUR-PARLIAMENT.md covers forking, and the
habit that decides whether future updates are painless — add files rather than edit
them, so git never has to merge the same file twice.
Writing it meant walking through a Norwegian adaptation for real, which found two
things that would have stopped a user on their first attempt.
A relative PARLIAMENT_CONFIG resolved against the current directory, so
`PARLIAMENT_CONFIG=parliament.no.yaml` worked when you happened to be standing in the
repository and failed everywhere else, including under systemd. Relative paths now
resolve against the repository, for PROMPTS_DIR and CONTENT_DIR too.
Worse, YAML 1.1 reads unquoted `no`, `yes`, `on`, `off`, `y` and `n` as booleans.
Norway is the worst possible case: `country: NO` and `prompt_language: no` both became
false, and the symptom was a TypeError deep inside a path join that named nothing
relevant. Text fields are now coerced back, and both parliament.yaml and the guide say
to quote such values, since the repair cannot recover the original capitalisation.
Verified by building a Norwegian fork the way the guide describes — adding
parliament.no.yaml, prompts/no/ and an adapter, editing nothing — and confirming the
app loads it. Sweden is unaffected and production still serves.
The README's documentation index is now grouped by what you are trying to do, with a
sentence on each entry rather than a bare filename.
Site copy now resolves through CONTENT_DIR, alongside PARLIAMENT_CONFIG and
PROMPTS_DIR. All three let a deployment keep its own wording, branding and contact
details outside the repository, so they never appear in a diff against upstream —
which is what keeps a production fork mergeable.
parliament.yaml's site.title was "rixdagen.se". That is the deployment's identity,
not Sweden's data, so upstream now ships a neutral default. The Swedish user guide
keeps its content but loses the personal contact details and site-specific wording;
a deployment ships its own guide by pointing CONTENT_DIR at it.
Fixes /api/guide, which still read ../user-guide.md after that file moved to
content/sv/ and had been returning 404.
Deliberately kept: the author metadata in pyproject.toml and the copyright line in
LICENSE, which are attribution rather than configuration, and the README's note that
this runs in production as rixdagen.se, which is provenance worth stating.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixteen system prompts lived as module-level string constants across chat.py,
board.py, synthesis.py, trip.py and llm_tools.py. They are the main thing a fork
for another parliament has to rewrite, and editing them meant editing Python.
They now live under prompts/sv/ as Markdown. Placeholders use string.Template
($name), not str.format: three of these prompts embed literal JSON braces that
str.format raises on, and safe_substitute leaves an unknown placeholder alone
rather than killing a live chat turn over a typo.
Technical configuration that had leaked into the prompt text is now templated:
websearch_to_tsquery('swedish', ...) became '$fts_config', "Answer in Swedish"
became "Answer in $answer_language", and the åäö preservation rule became
$preserve_characters. Domain vocabulary from parliament.yaml is available too, so a
prompt can say $speech_plural and read naturally in any language.
PROMPTS_RELOAD=1 re-reads the files per call, so prompt iteration no longer needs
a server restart.
The prompts themselves stay Swedish. That is the intended design: a fork writes
prompts/<lang>/ in its own language, and the loader falls back through
<lang>/ -> shared -> en/.
Verified by snapshotting all sixteen constants before the move and asserting
equality after: 16/16 render byte-identically, including after parameterization —
which is what proves the templating substitutes exactly what was there before.
tests/test_prompts_golden.py keeps that guarantee going forward.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything that made this Sweden-only in code now lives in one configuration file:
party list and colours, chamber activity types, the Postgres text-search
dictionary, the party-code pattern used to verify attributions, identifier shapes,
source URLs, the person-photo URL template, embedding model and dimension, and the
site copy.
info.py is deleted. Its party_colors_lighten table is gone too — the tint is now
computed from the party colour, so there is no second palette to keep in sync. Its
dead select_columns and css strings go with it.
The stylesheet no longer carries per-party rules. It had --party-M through
--party-NYD plus twenty [data-party="..."] selectors, which no amount of
configuration could adapt: CSS cannot read a dict. App.tsx now publishes the
configured palette as custom properties from /api/meta, and one color-mix rule
covers every party in any country.
The author's email and Twitter handle are out of the source entirely. Explainer
copy moved to content/sv/*.md, and contact details come from `site.contact`, which
upstream ships empty for a deployment to fill in via its own PARLIAMENT_CONFIG.
Two startup assertions added, both for failures that are otherwise silent: a
text-search config mismatch returns near-zero rows with no error, and a vector
column that disagrees with embeddings.dimension fails deep inside pgvector with a
message that never mentions configuration.
Verified: five searches spanning phrase, exclusion and prefix syntax — exercising
all three tsquery builders that changed — return byte-identical payloads against
production, with differing hit counts and first hits proving the queries really
differ. Frontend builds, and tsc reports the same 9 pre-existing errors as before,
none new.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lasse Edfast