A draft that lands nowhere

A commit made after its pull request has merged lands nowhere. A scene written for a version of the story that has already moved on does the same.

Ten changes went into one release between 3:39 in the afternoon and 8:01 at night, and the release went out at 9:20. Most were small: a symbol for an undecided state, a paragraph offered when a scene opens blank, a line the stylesheet could only afford by deleting another.

One of them was not small. Two sessions were working at once, and one of them made a commit on a branch whose pull request had already merged, seventeen minutes after it merged. It went nowhere. For three hours it sat one commit ahead of the main line and twenty behind, on a branch nobody would look at again, while the notes kept recommending everyone wait for it.

A third session found it by reading the notes, moved it across with its author and date intact, and merged it at 7:11. In the next forty minutes, four pull requests opened against that merge, and all four closed inside the same minute.

Work only counts when a reader can reach it, which is the same rule that makes the download link the real end of a release.