[TaylorMutch]

Summary

Revert #4976 now that v0.1.6 has been published successfully. This restores the normal version-based protobuf compatibility policy and removes the temporary exception mechanism from release qualification.

This reverts squash-merge commit ac7f615 in full.

Related Issue

CI qualification cleanup under the contributor write-access exception. Reverts #4976 as planned after the release; no separate issue.

Published release: https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/releases/tag/v0.1.6
Successful release run: https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/actions/runs/40550718544

Changes

• Remove the v0.1.6 prerelease exception from the release workflow.
• Remove the checker override, exception metadata, and dedicated exception tests.
• Remove temporary exception and rollback guidance from CI and contributor skills.
• Restore normal enforcement: patch trains reject protobuf breaks; appropriate version increments retain the existing allowance.

Release Notes

Testing

• Restored checker passes against current main with Buf; reports breaking changes forbidden without an active train.
• Eight focused compatibility checks passed from a temporary copy of the removed tests: real Buf field rename, breaking-change result handling, and invalid protobufs.
• Actionlint v1.7.12, Ruff lint and format, ShellCheck, and Bash syntax checks passed.
• mise run license:check passed for all 1,360 checked files.
• Markdown lint, affected guidance consistency review, and git diff --check passed.

Checklist

• Follows Conventional Commits.
• Commit signed off for DCO.
• Related CI and contributor guidance restored.

[github-actions]

Compatibility review (advisory)

New or updated breaking changes; see the full report for all findings.

1. api-behavior — No explicit risk acceptance found

qualification-summary.json previously always included an exceptions array, but now omits it while retaining schema_version 1 and the v1 media type.

• Impact: Downstream consumers requiring the documented array or iterating .exceptions[] fail when reading newly published qualification artifacts.
• Action: Retain exceptions: [] in v1 summaries while removing the waiver mechanism, because the supplied no-break train does not permit deleting this public field.
• PR: revert(ci): remove temporary v0.1.6 protobuf exception #4978

Review details

• Execution: complete
• Candidate: PR #4978 (f2a01c7b83b750f2d697f267fb9f8097b67c26d8)
• Baseline: 2c31ac7e606c4e175288cee3656b23192a1a36b0 (2c31ac7e606c4e175288cee3656b23192a1a36b0)
• Reviewed: rust-sdk, python-sdk, go-sdk, typescript-sdk, api-behavior, cli, configuration, policy, helm, state

Advisory review; publication gates are unchanged.

Branch check run

[TaylorMutch]

This is specifically a revert as called out in the PR description in #4976 , so no compatability is needed to be retained.

[purp]

LGTM 🚢