InferBridge 0.9.1-beta.1

InferBridge 0.9.1-beta.1

This is a beta pre-release and its artifacts are unsigned. Windows will report an
unknown publisher. Install it only if you accept that. Nothing in this release has been
Authenticode signed, and no signing claim is made anywhere in its metadata.

It is a maintenance pre-release on top of 0.9.0-beta.1. No new feature
areas were added. The changes are a repaired release and update browser panel, valid
browser-client markup, a packaged windowed-startup fix, Windows model-recovery cleanup
resilience, packaged Optimum CLI discovery validation, completion of the InferBridge
rename on three surfaces the 0.7.0 rename missed, and a corrected release-status section
in the README.

Fixes

• The release and update panel never worked. A missing closing parenthesis in the
  injected release script meant the browser refused to parse that entire <script>
  element, so the About and update surface silently did nothing: no version or build
  detail, no update check, no download link, and no signature statement. The expression is
  now balanced and the panel renders.
• The packaged launcher aborted its own native validation when started without a
  console. The frozen runtime hook gave up silently when it could not duplicate a
  standard descriptor, leaving sys.stdout and sys.stderr as None. Packaged
  third-party code writes to and flushes those streams unconditionally, so the new
  packaged Optimum check raised AttributeError and exited with the runtime-failure code.
  The hook now falls back to a discard stream, so a windowed process never carries a
  None standard stream.
• The browser client shipped invalid markup. The custom-model modal was missing one
  closing </div>, so every injected script and style element — 38 of them — was nested
  inside a hidden, aria-hidden modal overlay instead of the document body. Scripts and
  styles still executed, but any injected visible markup would have been silently hidden.
  The composed page now parses with balanced tags and no duplicate element ids.
• Continuous integration syntax-checked a hand-maintained list of ten injected browser
  scripts, and the release script was never added to it, which is why the first defect
  above shipped. The check now parses every inline script in the fully composed page, so a
  newly injected surface is covered automatically. Companion tests assert the composed
  page's tag balance, unique element ids, and that injected surfaces attach to the body.
• The Windows system tray tooltip still rendered the former product name. It now uses the
  canonical display name, matching every other desktop surface and the identity inventory.
• The private /desktop/instance payload and the model-library definition export both
  reported "application": "OpenVINO Windows LLM". Both now report the current product
  name. No consumer matches on that field; the launcher's duplicate-instance check uses
  the instance nonce.
• The external API contract validator titled its generated report with the former product
  name.
• README.md advertised 0.6.1 as the current stable release and 0.7.0 as an
  unpublished development version, which had been wrong since v0.7.0 shipped. It now
  records 0.8.0 as the current stable release, links the current beta artifacts, states
  that no published InferBridge artifact is signed, and indexes the release notes.

Hardening carried in this pre-release

These landed after the v0.9.0-beta.1 tag was cut and appear in a published artifact for
the first time here.

Model recovery cleanup on Windows

• Retries transient rmtree failures with a bounded backoff, so a Hugging Face cache or an
  incomplete OpenVINO output directory briefly held by Windows Search, antivirus, or a
  recently exited converter is removed instead of surfacing a raw filesystem error.
• Clears the Windows read-only attribute before retrying a failed removal, with fallbacks
  for the Windows/Python combinations that do not implement follow_symlinks for chmod
  or stat.
• Checks for symbolic links before existence, so a dangling link is refused rather than
  silently treated as an absent model directory.
• Raises a bounded, actionable conflict that names no local path when cleanup cannot
  complete, and preserves the recovery record so the operation stays retryable.

Packaged Optimum CLI discovery

• Bundles the optimum.commands.register namespace modules and gates the release build on
  the packaged Optimum CLI actually discovering the OpenVINO export command through the
  same namespace scan that optimum-cli export openvino uses. Bundling the registration
  module is not sufficient on its own if PyInstaller leaves it outside that filesystem
  scan, and the failure would previously have appeared only on a user's first conversion.
• This gate had never run in a packaged build before this release. Its first execution is
  what exposed the windowed standard-stream defect fixed above.

Repository hygiene

• Removed a dead private watchdog helper and applied the project's own lint and formatting
  rules to the files that had drifted.

Validation performed for this pre-release

Ruff lint and formatting, the full Python test suite, and the composed-page JavaScript
syntax check all pass. The external mock API contract validator passes against a
source-run server in the full profile with embeddings, benchmarks, and lifecycle
exercised. Packaged installed-mode and portable-mode mock smoke tests run as part of the
release build. Release provenance and SHA-256 checksums are verified independently of the
build.

The repaired release panel is verified by parsing, not by a browser interaction test. Its
rendered content on real update metadata has not been exercised end to end.

Not verified

Authenticode signing (these artifacts are unsigned), installer upgrade and downgrade on a
real Windows installation, real Intel CPU, GPU, or NPU execution, tokenizer behavior for
every converted model, and recovery behavior with every Hugging Face cache and checkpoint
layout. Those checks require the documented Windows release and hardware certification
procedures. A signed stable build must advance the version; see 0.9.0 for the
planned stable release record.