Proposal: adopt-single-release-channel

Why

The release train ran two channels: publishable work landed on main, but semantic-release published only when an owner advanced the beta branch and pushed it, cutting 0.1.0-beta.N prereleases to npm's beta dist-tag. The beta branch was a second moving part with no countervailing benefit:

• It rotted. The branch drifted three weeks behind main, broke two release runs in one day (2026-06-10), and nearly regressed the live collector by re-publishing stale code over newer fixes.
• It was redundant. Semver 0.x already signals prelaunch; a beta dist-tag on top of 0.x versions communicates nothing extra to operators.
• It taxed every surface. Docs, dashboard copy, CLI help, AS discovery metadata, and the doctor remediation all had to carry @beta pins (plus a dedicated cadence-lag guard, check-beta-cadence.mjs, built solely to detect the channel's own staleness failure mode).
• Prior art: Stripe, Vercel, and Plaid ship one stable channel with an optional canary; none run beta-only.

Owner decision, final: "no beta anywhere."

What Changes

• Release config (.releaserc.yaml): release from main only; no prerelease branch. Versions stay 0.x (graduating from 0.1.0-beta.N to 0.1.0) and publish to npm's default latest dist-tag. 1.0.0 becomes an intentional owner milestone, not a commit-phrasing accident.
• Workflow (.github/workflows/semantic-release.yml): trigger on push to main (plus workflow_dispatch); Docker image tags publish latest instead of beta.
• Retired machinery: beta-cadence.yml, check-beta-cadence.mjs and its test, and the release:cadence-check* scripts are deleted — the lag they guarded against cannot exist with a single channel.
• Policy inversion: check-package-release-policy.mjs now requires publishConfig.tag: "latest", forbids the retired @beta dist-tag in active install docs (instead of requiring it), and asserts the single-channel shape of .releaserc.yaml and the workflow.
• Surface sweep: every owner/agent-visible @pdpp/*@beta specifier becomes the plain package name — docs, dashboard/UI command builders, CLI help text, local-collector doctor remediation, AS discovery metadata (version_policy: "latest"), and the owner-journey harness manifest.
• Spec deltas: governance and surface-topology requirements that pinned the beta channel/wording are updated to the single-channel posture.

Impact

• Affected specs: reference-implementation-governance (npm publish posture, CLI release scenarios), reference-surface-topology (operator copy and drift-warning wording). The active publish-mcp-server-package change's mcp-adapter delta is reworded in place (it had not yet been archived).
• Affected code: .releaserc.yaml, .github/workflows/semantic-release.yml, root package.json scripts, packages/{cli,local-collector,mcp-server} manifests and command/help surfaces, console/site command libraries, the owner-journey acceptance harness, release policy checks, and operator docs.
• Not in scope (owner steps after the first main release proves out): delete the beta git branch, deprecate the 0.0.0 npm placeholders, and retire or repoint the npm beta dist-tag.
• Version continuity: existing tags are v0.0.0 and v0.1.0-beta.1..N on the beta lineage. The lane carries a git merge -s ours beta graduation merge so v0.0.0 is reachable from main; semantic-release (which ignores prerelease tags on a release branch) then computes the next version from v0.0.0 + Conventional Commits — feat commits exist and no breaking-change markers do, so the first single-channel release is 0.1.0, not an accidental 1.0.0 and not a tag collision.