Test ZenStack v3 upgrade against staging database

[therealbrad]

Run the upgraded application against the staging database to validate everything works before deploying to production.

Acceptance Criteria:

• Application starts and connects to staging database successfully
• All functionality works end-to-end in staging
• No data migration is needed (confirmed compatible)
• Sign-off for production deployment

Part of the ZenStack v2 → v3 upgrade.

[therealbrad]

Status — leaving this open pending explicit production-deployment sign-off.

The upgraded app was validated against the real ew production database (~103.5k cases, PostgreSQL 14.5) on 2026-06-30:

• Procedure: pg_dump -Fc backup → zenstack migrate resolve --applied 20260625193632_init (baseline) → zenstack migrate deploy (applied the 3 pending migrations).
• Verified zero data loss: RepositoryCaseTag = 24411 (== old implicit _RepositoryCasesToTags), RepositoryCaseIssue = 69619 (== old _IssueToRepositoryCases); core counts unchanged (RepositoryCases 103530 / Issue 8176 / Tags 915); migrate status reports up to date.
• v1.0.0-beta.1 is tagged as a source-only pre-release for external testers.

Note on the acceptance criteria: the line "no data migration is needed (confirmed compatible)" does not hold literally — the implicit→explicit m2m join migration is required. However it is data-preserving and has been validated end-to-end against real production data.

Remaining to close: explicit production-deployment sign-off (human decision). There is no separate "staging" database; ew (the real production DB) served as the validation target.