An absent S reference now phantomizes like any other missing reference, its dependent is deferred and retried when the artifact arrives, and the sweep excludes sub-manifests so it still terminates. Phantoms survive a restart through a rebuild-on-open invariant resting on a durable seen-submanifest setting rather than on records the log never wrote. The transfer gate decides by artifact shape on all three send paths, so a leaf is refused wherever a tree manifest is, and the memo returns its own copy rather than a view into pages the store may free.

The gate remembers what it withheld from a peer, which is what lets an exchange with a peer that refuses sub-manifests terminate at all. That record is now cleared only when the peer's announced version actually changes: a peer that re-announces the same version in every reply was clearing it every round, so the same artifacts were offered and refused forever.

One requirement is not implemented: a server whose setting is off must send the avoid-submanifests pragma, and emitting it changes the card sequence every clone-reply test walks. That is a protocol-shape change worth its own review rather than a rider here; the pragma is parsed and latched on receipt already. check-in: 8446adcd98 user: dmestas tags: sub-manifest