On Wed, 2026-05-13 at 12:13 -0400, Gregory Hayes via agora-discussion wrote: > On May 13, 2026, at 9:46 AM, Katherina Walshe-Grey via > agora-discussion <[email protected]> wrote: > > For what it's worth, as the author of Proposal 9332, the reading of > > "performing the single revision of [removing and inserting]" is > > certainly what I intended, and I see no reason why it should be "flatly > > impossible" to remove some text and insert some other text somewhere > > else at the same time. Rule 105, defining rule changes, just says that a > > proposal (or other instrument) can "amend the text of a rule"; it > > doesn't distinguish inserting text from removing it, or say only one > > sentence can be amended at a time, or anything like that. > > I don't think it's impossible to remove some text and insert some > other text somewhere else at the same time, I just think that it's > two different revisions. It's like saying, "Go to the grocery store > and buy the single item of an apple and a block of cheese", that's an > impossible task because an apple and a block of cheese are two > different items.
I think that this is an ambiguity in English – "revision" has multiple meanings, and can mean either "a change" or "a particular version", which are often conflated into "the changes that lead to a particular version". I interpret the proposal as meaning "do these changes at once so that there is no intermediate version, you go straight from the old version to the new version", which might not make sense if you interpret "a revision" as "a change", but makes more sense if you allow the "a particular version" meaning to influence the meaning of the sentence. It probably doesn't help that it has become, when dealing with versioning systems, extremely common to conflate a version with the changes that lead up to it. This has lead to common usage of the language surrounding this becoming extremely loose/imprecise, and thus can make it hard to interpret sentences that use it. -- ais523
