[P2-05] Master-canonical branch policy and final dev retirement

[lost-rob0t]

Current state — supersedes the obsolete Git Flow plan

The former long-lived dev/master split was retired on August 16, 2026.

Final audited pre-reconciliation state:

• master: e2fa1991d8b08b74bcb2194c7a10f02da2431ad1
• dev: 6d2feb103e57f2227b3609430ae7c68e7e834aa1
• merge base: e9586b935758dbae69283e6a099e30cdb29a5ba9
• dev was 78 commits ahead and 21 behind master

PR #99 performed the final semantic dev -> master reconciliation without rewriting either published history. It merged as 516742d1de433a79fe1921b1b8b1ac00e6599e2a after Smoke Tests, Container Stack, canonical schema lock, and operational-salvage gates were green.

Canonical branch policy

master is the only long-lived canonical development branch.

Every new short-lived branch starts from current master:

• feature/<issue>-<slug>
• fix/<issue>-<slug>
• research/<slug>
• hotfix/<issue>-<slug>

Every normal pull request targets master.

The dev branch is retired/deprecated. Never create new work from it, never target new pull requests at it, and do not recreate a permanent integration branch.

Historical dev PR disposition

• Implement Valkey target-lease backend with atomic fencing scripts #95: valid target-lease backend work; retarget/refresh against current master and preserve it.
• Switch StarIntel Server to GNU AGPLv3 #79: AGPL relicensing; separate legal/contributor-permission review, not runtime reconciliation.

Acceptance criteria

• Final semantic dev -> master reconciliation is merged and traceable in PR Retire dev: final reconciliation into master #99.
• Meaningful work from both diverged histories is preserved without force-pushing or rewriting published history.
• Checked-in development policy states that master is canonical and dev is retired.
• Normal CI PR branch filters target master rather than dev.
• Remaining valid historical dev-targeting PRs are retargeted or explicitly disposed.
• No required work remains reachable only from dev before any dev-ref deletion.

Close this issue after the checked-in branch-policy PR is merged and historical dev-targeting PRs have explicit dispositions.