NEWS

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locations 0.5.0.9000

User-facing changes

• Fixed get.code.by.alias() so one type can be applied to multiple aliases and a same-length type vector can be paired with the aliases, as documented. Scalar behavior and the named-list return shape are unchanged.
• Documented the exact differences between legacy all-vintage county results and the pinned current temporal view.

Maintenance

• Adopted a GitHub development pre-release policy so unresolved software and bundled-data licensing does not block continued engineering. Stable public or CRAN publication remains deferred until those terms are resolved.
• Added ADR 0001 defining stable location identity, versioned geographic definitions, time-bounded codes, typed crosswalk measures, and the legacy API migration boundary for the temporal-county work.
• Added executable normalized temporal-data schemas and semantic validators, with representative Connecticut, Alaska, and Montana contract fixtures.
• Added a deterministic internal temporal-county data slice built from the pinned 2025 Census Gazetteer and county-change sources. Its current view has 30 Alaska county-equivalents, 9 Connecticut planning regions, and 56 Montana counties; legacy historical codes remain time-bounded records, not aliases.
• Replaced Connecticut's invalid one-to-one modeling in the normalized store with 19 directional former-county-to-planning-region overlap edges derived from the pinned Census ACS22 relationship file. Land and water fractions are explicit; no population weights are inferred.
• Isolated the eight Connecticut one-to-one mappings in a legacy-only build input. Existing dot-named APIs retain their current behavior through the ADR 0001 migration schedule.
• Updated package maintainer metadata while preserving original authorship.
• Resolved the Connecticut crosswalk blocker for the temporal-county release.
• Added explicit temporal read APIs for querying locations by date and status, resolving complete official code history, inspecting durable identity, and returning typed many-to-many crosswalk results. Existing dot-named APIs and runtime registration behavior remain unchanged.
• Added compatibility contracts derived from location workflows used by JHEEM2.
• Added a separately pinned downstream integration workflow that installs the candidate package with JHEEM2 and exercises its real validation, sanitization, metadata, containment, overlap, and name-to-code paths.
• Generated the legacy county manager from the normalized temporal store plus an explicit order-and-label compatibility overlay. A full-manager CI parity gate protects existing codes, names, aliases, relationships, coordinates, and polygon behavior.
• Updated GitHub Actions checkout to its Node.js 24-based release.

locations 0.4.1

User-facing changes

• Added include.partial = TRUE to get.contained.locations() and get.containing.locations(). This exposes partial county footprints for tract-defined NSDUH regions while preserving the existing complete-only default.
• Added exact regression coverage for the 19 Illinois, District of Columbia, Delaware, and Massachusetts substate regions reported as returning no counties.
• Corrected the label for historical Montana county-equivalent 30113 and restored three county names that had been truncated during an earlier raw data rewrite.
• Added locations.data.version() so consumers can track bundled-data updates separately from package-code releases.

Maintenance and data governance

• Added compatibility contracts for existing exports, argument order, defaults, and representative return shapes.
• Added build-time integrity checks for locations, relationships, aliases, polygons, and relationship cycles.
• Added a checksum-validated source manifest and provenance audit for every raw input used by the package build.
• Marked the existing Connecticut county-to-planning-region aliases as a known high-severity blocker for the temporal-county release pending a many-to-many crosswalk.
• Classified the unused legacy ZIP and ZIP-like polygon inputs as dormant. No ZIP data or public functionality was removed.

Known issues

• Legacy county enumeration intentionally remains all-vintage for compatibility; use get_locations("COUNTY") for the pinned current view.
• Package and active curated-data reuse terms remain pending owner decisions in issue #3. Development snapshots do not grant general permission to reuse, modify, or redistribute the package. Maintainer metadata has been updated; its final institutional confirmation is deferred with stable publication.