rba-mcp 0.1.8 — customer-flow audit fixes

0.1.8 (2026-05-12)

Customer-flow audit fixes — surfaced when running rba-mcp against Claude
Desktop end-to-end. Two real UX gaps + a major distribution-side warning.

• Fix: start_date and end_date accept int years. MCP / LLM clients
  often send a year as a JSON number (start_date=2024) instead of a
  string ("2024"). Pre-0.1.8 this errored at the Pydantic boundary
  with a verbose "Input should be a valid string" message. Now: the
  Annotated type is str | int | None and _validate_period coerces
  int → str transparently. Bool is explicitly excluded from coercion
  (since isinstance(True, int) is True in Python) so True/False
  still raise a clean type error rather than becoming "1"/"0".
• Fix: describe_table populates SeriesDetail.start_date for
  curated tables. The non-curated branch already fetched the CSV and
  ran df[sid].first_valid_index(); the curated branch shortcut to
  YAML metadata only and left start_date null on every curated
  series. The LLM needs this to pick a sensible date range without
  trial-and-error queries — e.g. F11 starts 2010, F11.1 starts 2023.
  Now both branches populate the field.
• README + example configs: recommend uvx --upgrade rba-mcp for
  Claude Desktop / Cursor. Plain uvx rba-mcp (no flag) uses
  whatever wheel is cached and the long-lived MCP child process holds
  it — new PyPI releases never reach a running install until the user
  manually uvx --refreshes and fully quits Claude Desktop. Found in
  the wild during a customer-flow audit: an install was running 0.1.2
  against PyPI 0.1.7, five releases of fixes never adopted. --upgrade
  makes uvx check PyPI on each launch. Same fix shipped to abs-mcp's
  example configs.
• Tests: +4 regressions in tests/test_stress_regressions.py
  (int year accepted; int = str equivalence; bool still rejected;
  curated start_date populated). 107 unit tests now (was 103).