Changelog

Notable changes to Rekal. Format follows Keep a Changelog; versions follow semantic versioning under the scope defined in docs/compatibility.md.

Per-release notes for every 0.1.x and 0.2.x build are on the Releases page. This file starts at 1.0; it records what 1.0 ships and everything after.

Unreleased

Fixed

• The installer resolves the release version off the releases/latest redirect instead of the GitHub API. Unauthenticated API calls are capped at 60 an hour per IP, so a shared office egress could exhaust the budget before a user typed anything, and some networks reach github.com and raw.githubusercontent.com but never allowlist api.github.com — both ended the install at "Could not fetch latest version from GitHub". The redirect uses the same host the download already needs. When resolution does fail it now reports the HTTP code each host returned and names REKAL_VERSION, which skips the lookup.
• README install commands work as written. --target is shown with the bash -s -- a piped shell requires, and REKAL_VERSION in front of the shell that runs the script rather than in front of curl, where it applied to the download and never reached the script — silently installing the latest version instead of the pinned one. The commands now name a version so a first install does not depend on the lookup at all.

1.0.2 - 2026-08-04

Fixed

• rekal push --rebuild refuses when the remote branch holds checkpoints this machine's data.db does not — it no longer silently deletes another machine's already-shared frames.
• The merged-only export gate judges ancestry against local main when it is ahead of a stale origin/main, so a checkpoint ships on the same git push that merges it rather than waiting for the next one.
• Fish installs create ~/.config/fish/ before appending the PATH export, so a machine that never configured fish still gets a working profile line.

1.0.1 - 2026-08-04

Fixed

• Installer no longer refuses machines without Claude Code — Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Kiro and OpenCode users can follow the documented curl | bash path.
• Headless installs (CI, containers, no controlling tty) no longer crash on the PATH-prompt step; they silently append instead.
• Drilling a session missing from both databases reports a plain "session not found" instead of a raw SQL driver string.
• rekal sync --help documents that a plain sync also checkpoints and pushes the caller's own local work before fetching.

1.0.0 - 2026-08-04

First stable 1.0 release. The store format, wire format, command surface and exit codes are covered by the version number under docs/compatibility.md. Ranking and index.db remain deliberately unfrozen.

Capabilities

• Capture. Sessions from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Copilot and Kiro, snapshotted by a post-commit hook into an append-only data.db. Re-capturing a growing conversation appends to its existing session rather than storing it again. No capture runs during a rebase.
• Redaction. Secret redaction (pattern plus Shannon entropy) and home-directory path anonymization run before anything is written to the database, so nothing unscrubbed can reach the wire later.
• Sharing. Merged work only. A checkpoint reaches the orphan branch rekal/<email> when its commit is an ancestor of the default branch, or its branch landed as a patch-equivalent squash. Unmerged spikes stay local.
• Recall. Hybrid BM25 + LSA + deep-semantic ranking with additive facet, recency and recall-graph layers, returning a compact seed digest by default and raw JSON under --json.
• Knowledge layer. Tracked prose at HEAD chunked and searched alongside sessions, answering "what is the convention now" with a file and line pointer instead of an old conversation.
• Recall graph. Query-time edges from a session to the query that reached it, local-only and never pushed, surfacing as a [reached N× drilled N×] hint and an opt-out ranking boost.
• Single binary. Database, embedding model, inference engine, full-text extension and compression dictionary all embedded. No runtime, no service, no API key.

Changed since 0.2.x

• rekal push --force is removed. The append-only wire format is a structural guarantee, not a policy, and a flag that overwrites a branch would demote it to the latter. No code path force-pushes; discarding a ref remains an ordinary git operation.
• rekal push --re-export is renamed --rebuild. The old name still works as a hidden alias and will be removed no earlier than 2.0.
• rekal push reports a publication failure as a warning by default, and as an error only under --strict, so a diverged memory branch cannot abort the user's git push.
• Short flags across the command surface (-p, -c, -a, -A, -n, -j, -e, -s, -r, -o, -F, -q, -i).
• rekal query --session accepts the short handle from a digest (s14) as well as a full ULID.
• rekal query --sql runs on a read-only handle and accepts a single statement.
• Zero-argument subcommands reject extra words instead of silently answering a different question; rekal -- <query> forces recall past a command-name collision.
• rekal init runs a structural index rebuild so the first recall does not silently pay for an empty index.db.

Documentation

• A recorded demo driven by a real agent, generated by scripts/demo/record.py rather than staged.
• README corrected against the shipped binary: rekal clean residue, the seed digest format, platform support, and the download and on-disk size.
• Compatibility contract published in docs/compatibility.md.