A POLICY CHANGE, not a bug fix. Gates 5 to 7 prove the mirror's manifest is byte-reproducible from the check-in this import builds. Flat mode claims that; sub-manifest mode restructures the file set behind S cards, so its check-in is a different artifact by construction and claims nothing of the kind. Refusing to release the metadata because a mode failed to reproduce something it never promised is a category error.

What makes the drop safe is gate 3 -- the bytes hash to the name a sibling manifest.uuid records, which a project file merely called 'manifest' cannot satisfy. That gate is untouched and still catches the look-alike. Gate 8 still guards the tags member. The B-card and S-card shape checks move with gates 5 to 7: a delta manifest is a real check-in, and refusing it only ever mattered because gate 5 needs a complete F run to compare against.

On a sound source the win is small: bench measures 180 retained on sqlite, and this takes that to about 1. The win is on sources holding shunned or phantom content, where the origin's manifests name bytes the origin no longer has and no export can reproduce them -- permanent stranding today. libfossil goes from 293 of 3819 commits validated to 3817, and its store from 35.0 MB to 30.2 MB.

Costs, stated rather than discovered later: this retires the only signal that a source repository is incomplete, and it leaves mirrorTreeMatches's tree arm unreachable from classification, annotated in place with the condition for deleting it. check-in: 063a66e4c5 user: dmestas tags: sub-manifest