The notes are the annotation of a tag rather than part of the project. A tag
carries one message, and the message is written once and read by whoever
looks at the tag, so the file is kept beside the source to make the tag with
and is not itself committed. It is ignored, and the README no longer lists
it, because a reader of the tree would otherwise be looking for a file the
tree does not have.
The two commits that carried it are gone rather than followed by a third
that removes it, so the file is in no commit at all. Both were unpushed, and
the commit the remote has is their parent, so the history is still a
fast-forward.
What those commits also did is kept: the design notes are now listed in the
tree of the README, and the documentation link to the JSON object macro names
the macro rather than a private method of the parser.
Three things found in the check before a release. A directory of
screenshots taken while working on the interface had been committed; it
is removed and ignored, because it is a working note rather than part of
the service. Two branches kept pointing at the history from before the
licence changed, which is the only place that history was still reachable;
they are gone. The page title still named the service the way it was named
before it became apsis-book.
The binary was checked from an empty directory with no content tree and no
frontend build beside it: it serves every route from what it carries.