Publish CI red since March + legacy packaging: maintenance-mode plan

[thorwhalen]

From an automated fleet audit (2026-08-11). Recording findings + plan for this maintenance-mode package (README points users to its successor, ho).

Findings

• The last two master CI runs failed in the Publish (3.10) job (logs expired) — consistent with the known wads legacy-publish breakage for un-migrated repos (current_pypi_version missing import), so PyPI may be behind master.
• Legacy packaging: setup.cfg + setup.py (0.1.30), no pyproject.toml.
• Tracked build/ and egg-info artifacts in the tree.
• Thin test surface: essentially one test module for ~15 modules.

Recommended plan (maintenance-mode scope — keep it minimal)

1. Modern wads migration (pyproject + uv CI stub) — fixes the publish job as a side effect; the smallest honest fix given the known root cause lives in the legacy path.
2. Remove tracked build artifacts, extend .gitignore.
3. Do NOT invest in test expansion here — the successor is ho; add a deprecation pointer in the PyPI long_description instead so pip users learn about ho.

Verify PyPI vs master version drift before publishing anything (a burned version number can't be reused).