(Summoning Richard...)

In the process of bringing the forum-edit-deltify branch up to date i inadvertently included an unintended local-only change in the merge from the trunk to the branch:

https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/info/04e1c97854fdcb90

After realizing that, i did a --backout merge:

https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/info/070d6ea103280c5a

Which returned me to the state from before the merge and removed the unintended local addition (the tag ls -inverse flag mentioned in /forumpost/c752ab9e233f0). That's all fine and good, but now merging trunk, or any recent ancestor of it, into the branch leaves me with:

[stephan@lapdog:~/fossil/fossil]$ f merge trunk
...
Merge skipped because it is a no-op.  Use --force to override.

Adding --force performs the merge but leaves me with an empty diff:

[stephan@lapdog:~/fossil/fossil]$ f merge trunk --force
...
Round-trips: 1   Artifacts sent: 0  received: 0
Pull done, sent: 505  received: 1699  ip: 45.33.6.223
[stephan@lapdog:~/fossil/fossil]$ f diff
[stephan@lapdog:~/fossil/fossil]$ 

And yet an explicit diff from trunk says otherwise:

[stephan@lapdog:~/fossil/fossil]$ f diff --from trunk | wc -l
8165

i see two ways out of this, but would like to consult before doing so:

1. Back up 2 versions (the one before the merge) and commit again, which will force a fork. (No big deal, just unsightly (not nearly as much as the backout merge).)

2. Back up 2 versions, move the improperly-merged-in 04e1c97854fdcb90 to a mistake branch, and re-perform the merge from trunk (the local -inverse flag was lost on the backout, so it wouldn't be included this time).

But that leaves (no pun intended) me wondering why a plain merge from trunk, directly after the backout, does not merge trunk back in?