[Valtora]

Pull Request

Description

Prepares 2.6.0. docs/VERSION moves to 2.6.0, which the release workflow checks against the tag, and .github/release-notes-template.md is rewritten for this release. That covers the highlights, a Breaking Changes section for the install-wide transcription engine (#334), and the upgrade, migration, rollback and known-issue sections. The changelog section is still generated from the commits by scripts/render_release_notes.py.

2.6.0 rather than 3.0.0, although #334 carries a !. Only installs with several users see a change, startup carries the owner's choice into config.json, and nobody has to act.

The commit review and the soak run on the live stack found six bugs, all fixed and merged before this PR: #358 and #359 from the review, and #361, #362, #363 and #364 from the soak. #364 adds this release's only Alembic revision, so the Rollback section now asks for a schema downgrade before the 2.5.1 images.

Type of change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that changes existing behaviour)
• Documentation update

Checks run

• Backend tests: no code change
• Python quality: no code change
• Frontend lint: no code change
• Frontend unit tests: no code change
• Frontend build: no code change
• Docs validation: python3 scripts/validate_docs.py
• Alembic validation: no migration in this PR

python3 scripts/render_release_notes.py v2.5.1..HEAD renders the changelog with #334 under Breaking Changes and #330 under Security.

Migration impact

• No database migration in this PR.
• Adds an Alembic migration.

Documentation impact

• No documentation change required.
• Updated the relevant guide(s) in the same PR.

Security impact

• No security-sensitive change.
• Touches auth, tokens, encryption, capture ownership, or exposure.

Manual verification

Soak run on the live stack, rebuilt from main at 8a0be06, with a database snapshot before each deploy:

• The migration ran on first start: file_size_bytes is bigint and the database is at b182c2378829.
• The House of Lords benchmark imported as the 3.3 GB MP4 in 314 chunks. The upload took 26 s, finalize returned 200 at 31 s, and the event loop never stalled. The audio was kept as a 70.8 MB .m4a and the video removed. Processing finished in about 25 minutes and the notes generated first time with claude-haiku-5-5; the transcript matches the audio-only run below exactly.
• The same sitting as .m4a: 998 utterances across 9,002 s, 54 speakers found against 53 logged, no repeated utterance ids. Notes were regenerated with claude-haiku-5-5 after fix(anthropic): read every text block, not the first block #363.
• Chat answered on the finished meeting, and on the meeting still processing it answered 409.
• Ollama validation and model listing work against a reachable server.
• Trivy with the release gate's settings, on images built from main: api, frontend, worker and worker-io all pass.