Repositories that enable fossil's manifest setting expect manifest, manifest.uuid and manifest.tags in the checkout, and their builds read them to stamp a version. A zit checkout could not produce them, so such a build failed or, worse, succeeded with no version embedded. zit open --manifest writes them; the bare flag means ru, and a value picks any combination of r (the check-in artifact), u (its hash) and t (its branch and symbolic tags). The choice is recorded in the checkout record, so every later update refreshes the files; absent flag writes nothing. The selection is explicit rather than read from the cloned repository because the two places fossil keeps it can disagree and only one syncs, so a checkout reading the setting could diverge from a fossil checkout carrying a local override while claiming fidelity. Contents match fossil byte for byte, including the sterilizing comment it appends to manifest. check-in: b38b3be769 user: dmestas tags: trunk