NB: This is not a new issue (it existed in 20.1) however it just caused me to spend a lot of time staring at my screen not understanding what was going on.

What I did:

1. on node n1, cockroach start without --join (or a self-join)
2. on node n2, cockroach start --join=n1

At this point I verified in logs that n2 was establishing a conn to n1, and n1 was receiving an init request / join request from n2.

3. then I ran cockroach init --host=n2

That caused n2 to initialize a cluster centered on n2 (with node ID 1). However n1 does not participate and does not join, and remains uninitialized (no node ID).

This surprised me -- I thought that the join flag need not create a full connectivity graph for the init command to propagate throughout the established connections.

Was that the intended behavior?

cc @tbg @bdarnell @irfansharif