Canceled release preparation

On 2026-10-24 the owner canceled the first official release preparation and requested dependency-notice fixes, centralized version metadata, the Windows path regression fix and acceptance review before another release is started.

The preparation commit is 17cafd9. Its 1.0.0-candidate-1 execution and distributions are historical, unqualified artifacts. Do not publish or tag them as the first stable release. Existing results and checksums remain unchanged. The agent created no release tag.

Current work is development-only; see Maintenance regression evidence. A future release needs a separate explicit start and fresh qualification against its final inputs.