Item F8: A stack of merged pull requests never reached `main` — *closed*

Three research rounds developing the diachronic-answerability mathematics — answerability carriers, anchored slices and authenticated semantic Transfer, and faithful semantic preservation, together with the CF-coverage and proper-exercise rounds beside them — **are not on main.** Their pull requests are marked MERGED on the forge, and they were: into each other. The stack was based on round/2026-08-30-liability-theory and then on round/2026-08-30-answerability-carriers, and no pull request from the top of that stack to main was ever opened. The trees exist on those branches and in working copies; the repository's history on main does not contain them.

How it was found. The September consolidation cited two of the rounds by path; tests/dead_pointers.py failed in CI and passed locally, because the local checkout had the directories as untracked files left by another session. The gate did exactly its job, and the local pass was the misleading signal.

Why it matters beyond the citations. Those rounds' exact fixtures do not run in this repository's CI, so results attributed to them are paper-derived only from main's point of view. The consolidation now cites the underlying note by section and theorem number instead, and its STATUS_LEDGER.md marks the affected rows.

Resolved on 2026-09-01. The maintainer asked for the fix, and the stack was landed: current main was merged into round/2026-08-30-liability-theory on a new branch and opened as one pull request. Three files conflicted and all three were additive on both sides — state/rounds.json resolved as the union of the two record sets, PROVENANCE.md keeping both sides' rows, and the generated views regenerated. No round document was edited. The repository's runner count went from thirty-five projects to forty-one, which is the six recovered rounds' fixtures now running. DECISIONS.md carries the account, and the September checkpoint's path citations are restored.

The lesson outlives the fix, and is why this entry stays. A MERGED badge names the base the pull request had, not main. Nothing in the current gates checks that a round directory referenced anywhere actually reached the default branch, and a stacked round is exactly the shape that slips through — it was caught here only because a citation happened to point at one. A gate comparing state/rounds.json against what the default branch actually contains would have caught it directly; whether that is worth building is a maintainer call and is not filed as an item.