- Config/update/doctor: retry config recovery after failed backup restore, skip shell env fallback on Windows, exclude prerelease tags from the stable git channel, support deep config edits, warn instead of aborting on unreadable cron stores, prune stale bundled plugin paths, and avoid duplicate restart prompts when the Gateway is already healthy. (#85739, #85787, #86060, #86260, #86384, #86533) Thanks @liaoyl830.

- Install/release: support Alpine CLI installs and runtime floors, avoid npm `min-release-age` installer failures, bound npm/package/Docker install phases, restore config parent ownership in Docker, seed Docker lockfile package tarballs before prune, and make release/plugin prerelease checks fail closed instead of hanging or false-greening. (#85491)

- Security: avoid printing Gateway tokens in Docker, validate plugin model-pattern regexes safely, escape transcript metadata field names, harden session allowlist glob matching, audit Claude permission overrides under YOLO, and require explicit allow for ACP auto approvals. (#85849, #85934, #86046, #86557)

- Media/images: replace Sharp with Photon, normalize HEIC/HEIF before image descriptions, route Codex image API keys through OpenAI, preserve image compression metadata, and auto-scale live tool result caps. (#85776, #86037, #86437, #86857)

- Media/images: replace Sharp with Rastermill, keep EXIF normalization best-effort, normalize HEIC/HEIF before image descriptions, route Codex image API keys through OpenAI, preserve image compression metadata, and auto-scale live tool result caps. (#85776, #86037, #86437, #86857, #86923)

- Memory: prevent semantic vector indexes from silently degrading when embeddings are unavailable, stop doctor OOMs on large session stores, preserve sidecar hooks/artifacts, write fallback dream diaries, use CJK-aware dreaming dedupe, and avoid per-file watcher FD fan-out. (#80613, #82928, #85060, #85704, #85967, #86701) Thanks @brokemac79, @openperf, and @yaaboo-gif.

- Agents/sessions: include visibility metadata on restricted `sessions_list` results so scoped counts are clearly reported without widening access or exposing hidden-session counts. (#86944) Thanks @ferminquant.

- Gateway/DNS: validate wide-area discovery domains before deriving zone paths or writing zone files, so invalid `discovery.wideArea.domain` and `dns setup --domain` values fail with a DNS-name diagnostic instead of falling through to unrelated configuration errors. Thanks @mmaps.