A file the repository deleted now leaves the mesh

On memex.systemorph.com, three Crm/Source/Mail* code nodes deleted from MeshWeaver.Crm on 2026-09-06 were still in the partition — and still compiled into every Crm type — two days later. Edu/Course had been deleted upstream for 53 days. Six retired nodes across two of the portal's fourteen synced partitions; two of them parked at compilationStatus: Error, recompiled on every boot and reported by the pre-production NodeType sweep. Because the source-fingerprint gate hashes the live source set, every Crm bundle stayed refused for as long as the three files did.

The import had actually found them. Its own log says so:

↩ Kept Crm/Source/Mail (added on the server — commit to sync it back).
Imported 23 node(s), kept 5 local change(s), pruned 0, synced 0 content file(s).

Two things had to be true for that to become permanent, and both are now fixed.

Only a person's write counts as a server edit. The prune keeps a node changed on the server since the last sync — but the sync horizon is deliberately held while anything is preserved, so a previous import's own writes sat after it and read as "newer on the server" for ever. Every one of the six retired nodes was import-written (system-security, or no author at all); not one carried a real user id. ImportConflictPolicy.IsHumanEdit is what separates them, and a node a person edited is still preserved exactly as before.

And a run that kept nodes back no longer licences the next skip. This is what made the residue permanent rather than merely slow. The import short-circuits on a content-addressed marker that the next run reads instead of the partition — so the marker is a claim about the partition, and the run that kept five nodes back stamped it green anyway. The next sync then answered Skipped, reported Preserved = 0 — a zero nothing measured — and advanced the partition's seen commit to the branch head, after which every later build answered "already at this commit". The marker now records what its run left undone (preserved, pruneRefused); a marker that does not say "converged" — including every marker written before today, which says nothing — is re-examined once, which is what retires what is already there. A converged run's marker still short-circuits, at exactly the cost it always did.

The design is in The Import Marker Records Convergence.