feat(cli): cli-3.44.0 — install-merge-driver, and correct what skipping it costs

[montfort]

Closes FU-001.

What the premise check found

The registry merge driver shipped in cli-3.41.0 to close #391 — reported from Sentinel with concrete evidence: three closures silently reverted while merging three parallel PRs of one Charter.

Before building, I checked whether the fix was in use. It was inert everywhere:

Installation	Registry entries	.gitattributes	git config
Sentinel (filed #391)	296	absent	absent
LNXDrive	19	absent	absent
straymark (self-adoption)	4	absent	absent

The global CLI was already 3.41.0, so the driver was available in all three.

Stated up front and unchanged by this PR: that is not evidence of setup friction — the driver was ~16 hours old, and 16 hours of non-adoption proves nothing. The build proceeded on your call, and AILOG-2026-08-06-001 R2 records it that way rather than retro-justifying it.

What the data did support was a different framing: the fix was not reaching the adopter who asked for it, because a two-command step had not been run. That is what made a standalone command necessary — FU-001 proposed an init prompt, but init refuses to run on an existing installation, so a flag alone would have helped nobody who has already adopted.

Changes

• straymark followups install-merge-driver [--path .] — writes both halves, idempotently. An existing binding (even to a different driver) and a merge.straymark-followups.driver pointing elsewhere are left untouched and reported: silently overwriting a deliberate override is not the tool's call.
• straymark init --merge-driver / --no-merge-driver, plus a prompt when neither is given — gated on stdin.is_terminal() and on the target being a git repo. init runs in CI and provisioning scripts, where a blocking prompt is a hang. Mirrors the --hooks precedent (principle fix: consistent fw-/cli- version display across all commands #6).
• Dogfooded here, with the clone step added to CONTRIBUTING.md.

A correction to my own work

I had written — in the module doc and in the .gitattributes block the command generates — that without the git-config half the attribute line is "inert" and git "silently falls back to a normal conflict".

Both are wrong. An A/B merge on a seeded registry (same two branches with diverging counters, driver configured in one clone and unset in the other):

	Result
Driver wired	merge succeeds, all closures survive, counters consistent
Driver missing	fatal: custom merge driver straymark-followups lacks command line — merge aborts

The committable half does not just fail to help; it breaks merges for anyone who has not run the setup. Corrected in the module doc, the generated .gitattributes comment, the command output, and CLI-REFERENCE (EN/es/zh-CN). It also sharpens FU-001's case: forgetting the step is a hard stop, not friction.

Verified

• cargo test: 958 passed, 0 failed.
• 5 new tests: both halves written; idempotent (a second run adds no duplicate line — load-bearing, since the init prompt can be accepted more than once); an existing .gitattributes survives including its last line when the file has no trailing newline; a foreign driver is preserved and reported; refuses outside a git repo; init exposes both flags.
• End to end in anger, the only test that proves the wiring does anything: two branches closing different entries so the CLI-owned counters diverge and conflict. Clean merge, all closures intact.

Known consequence

Committing .gitattributes here means a contributor who merges a branch touching the registry hits that fatal until they run the command. Mitigated where they will look — a numbered step in CONTRIBUTING.md § Setup Steps, and the failure mode spelled out inside .gitattributes itself. The alternative, not committing the binding, means the driver never works for anyone, which is the state this PR exists to leave.

Left open: wiring Sentinel and LNXDrive. Sentinel is the adopter that filed #391 and the only installation with the registry volume to hit the conflict routinely — until then the fix stays unexercised where it was needed. Recorded as a follow-up.

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