Timeline

A read verb could only reach a store by walking up from the cwd, and timeline/log could only emit the whole history. -R/--repo names a store directly, so timeline, log, leaves, branch, tag, info, ls, cat, artifact and annotate run against it with no working tree; a verb that reads or writes the checkout refuses -R by name rather than silently operating on the cwd's store. -n N caps timeline and log at the N most recent check-ins (0 means all), ordered by the same DAG the full listing uses. The -n spelling stays --dry-run on add/rm/clean/addremove, a per-verb overload matching fossil, so those verbs reject -n N and keep their boolean sense.

stat is left out of the -R grant on purpose: it interrogates only the store, but its handler takes no redirected repository, so it refuses -R by name rather than read the cwd's store while appearing to honor the flag. check-in: 43468196c2 user: dmestas tags: trunk

The store could not be interrogated from outside a checkout: no way to ask how many artifacts it holds, which ones, or how many of its bytes are content rather than framing. zit stat answers from one pass over the frames -- store-bytes, content-bytes, frame overhead, artifact and delta counts. Content is summed from each frame's payload during the walk, never derived from the .zit file size, which also carries the store header, a per-frame header and padding; a size-derived figure would look like a result and be a fabrication, so the two stay separate fields and the overhead between them stays checkable. --artifacts lists the stored hashes for comparison across stores. The frame walk and its accounting live in storestat, shared with the storage benchmark, so the verb inherits the benchmark's exact-accounting test and the two cannot drift. check-in: 921678c019 user: dmestas tags: trunk

Repositories that enable fossil's `manifest` setting — fossil, althttpd, pikchr — expect `manifest`, `manifest.uuid` and `manifest.tags` in the checkout; 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`, 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 disagree and only one syncs: althttpd's versioned setting says `on`, its local config `rtu`. A checkout reading the setting could diverge from a fossil checkout carrying a local override while appearing to promise fidelity.

Contents match fossil byte for byte, including the sterilizing comment it appends to `manifest`. A tracked file of one of those names is never replaced. closed check-in: dc36496c3b user: dmestas tags: iss6