i have no idea what just happened here with update and merging, but here's what my bash history and fallible short-term memory tells me...

(@Andy Goth: please read this! i may have crossed the streams with you!)

The trunk, as of this writing, looks like:

https://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/screenshots/fossil-merge-weirdness-2020-08-16.png

What led to that, as best as i can reconstruct it:

• i was working on the line-number-section branch, unaware that Richard had merged it for 2.12.
• Tried to commit and got a warning about a closed leaf.
• Updated to trunk but got a conflict.
• undo
• Save stash
• Update to trunk
• Apply stash. Expected the conflict but didn't get one.
• Tested and checked in. (Edit: nope - happened later.)
• Did not notice that fossil moved me to the "bad-merge" branch, and i have no idea why it did that. i did not do update tip, only an unqualified "update" and "update trunk".

Here's where it gets unclear...

• Tried to committed the first part of my stash.
• It seems, looking at my history, that it failed, i stashed, updated, applied the stash, and committed again. That seems to have resulted in 2 commits: 154f6484 (in the "bad-merge" branch) and 2018954b (trunk).
• Committed 2nd part of my stash (4368f529).
• Looking at the timeline now, it looks like i may well have inadvertently checked in undesired changes from Andy G. from the bad-merge branch.

My current recommendation, but want to discuss it first, is to move:

https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/timeline?c=ea6365a8df6ab5fe&y=a

To a "mistake" branch and i'll re-commit my changes from its parent:

https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/timeline?c=9d2b7cab7ac64cf8&y=a

:-?

Edit: possibly nevermind. See the first response. It's still really weird, though.

Looking at the timeline now, it looks like i may well have inadvertently checked in undesired changes from Andy G. from the bad-merge branch.

Or maybe not:

https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/info/4c16a24995b48fbb

is the start of that fork (which appears to be inadvertent) but it contains no changes.

See the wrong way to close a branch post for an explanation of what happened.

Update: this is mostly explained in /forumpost/1477c7840b, but i'm still at a loss to explain why i was locally on bad-branch without having done an explicit update to tip.

Your check-out remembers the specific SHA3 hash that you have checked out, not the name of the branch. So when the check-in that you had checked out moved to the new branch, that moved your check-out with it.

That makes perfect sense, and now i'm just surprised that it hasn't happened to me before.

Suggestions for how to improve the UX are welcomed.

I suppose clients could detect when they have been moved to a new branch an issue a warning....