Oh no, we have to change this. I had no idea, and I’m not sure where this comes from. The roles of the unpublished and published branches are essential, and must not change. For just one of many reasons, having unpublished on a local git branch lets you make kinds of changes that are not possible thru the web interface. The web interface is designed to be enable a subset of possible changes, but there will always be exceptions.
The “Unpublished changes” page is an enhancement, not a replacement. It should let you view what is on the unpublished branch. That’s literally why it’s called that!
Again, I apologize, I had no idea this was the case. It looks like maybe there was a misunderstanding at some point in the development. This seems so obvious to me that I probably forgot to check it.
Well, will you look at that. I just reviewed the bug reported here:
And it turns out the correct footnote, which was quite complex, survived only in the unpublished branch. I was able to rescue it because literally the whole purpose of git is that everything is preserved and you can recover anything. Which is why the unpublished branch exists in the first place.