New Feature Work Needs a New Number

The moment 1.7 was declared feature-frozen — "everything the eighteen alphas built is now feature-complete, from here the line takes stabilisation fixes only" — three PRs were already open against main that were exactly what that sentence rules out: co server new --region, an authorization layer for sharing an email address across accounts, and the signed grant primitives a future proxy feature will need. None of them belonged on release/1.7 anymore. All three still needed to ship somewhere.

The version they landed in couldn't be another 1.7.0aN. main's pyproject.toml still said 1.7.0a18 — the exact commit the beta was cut from — and PEP 440 sorts a19 before b1, which would have made three genuinely new post-freeze features look, to any tool or person reading the version, like they predated the beta they actually came after. The freeze wasn't just a policy statement; it was the boundary a version number has to respect once a beta exists on the other side of it.

So main gets its own next number: 1.8.0a1. Cutting it is mechanical in a way that's worth noticing — the same four files, the same test that fails if they disagree, the same docs-site preview channel to update, run exactly the way they were for every one of the eighteen 1.7 alphas before it. The only thing that changed is which train the number names.

One of the three isn't a feature yet in the way a release note usually means it: connectonion.network.proxy ships signed grant and delegation objects — a real, tested authorization primitive — with no co proxy command anywhere that uses it. It's in this release because merged code ships in every wheel whether or not there's a command line pointed at it yet, not because there's something to demo. The version history entry says so plainly rather than implying a command exists that doesn't.