The beta channel (retired)

Vrtmv retired the beta channel on 2 October 2026. There is one release channel now, stable. This page is kept for accounts that were enrolled: it says what changed, what an installed beta build does today, and what happens to the reports those builds sent.

What changed

• No current release reports diagnostics. Beta builds reported diagnostics on every run; that was the condition of the channel. The reporting code was removed from the engine on 3 October 2026, and 2.2.0 is the first release built without it. Stable builds never sent these reports.
• The vrtmv diagnostics command is gone. It printed a build's channel and what the build reported, and it was removed with the reporting code. A 2.2.0 or later binary does not have it.
• The endpoint that received reports has been removed from the API's code. The same change makes the table that stored them refuse new rows. Both take effect when an API built from that code is deployed. This page does not record whether that has happened yet, so it does not say that a report sent today is refused.
• Enrolment is closed. The portal no longer offers a beta request, approval or download.

What leaves the host from a current build is described in Architecture and Security posture.

If a beta build is still installed

A beta build is one whose version ends in -beta.N; vrtmv --version prints it. The last beta version was 1.1.0-beta.7.

An installed beta build still contains the reporting code and still tries to send a report after each command. Until the API is deployed without the receiving endpoint, assume that report is still accepted and stored. After that it is refused, and the command's result does not change: the send was written so that a failure never affects the command, with a short timeout and no retry.

The way to stop a beta build reporting is to replace it with a stable build. See Installation.

Reports already sent

Reports an account's beta builds sent while it was enrolled are kept for 180 days from the day they were received and then deleted by a scheduled purge. The purge still runs. Retiring the channel did not extend that period.

The portal page that listed these reports and let a member delete them was removed with the channel. Vrtmv will delete an account's reports before the 180 days are up on request: write to support@vrtmv.com.

The record of the enrolment itself is kept: who requested it, who approved or withdrew it, and under which version of the terms. So is the note that a deletion happened and how many reports it covered. Neither holds the content of any report.

What a report contained

For reference, this is the closed list of fields a beta build sent, one report per command. No field was meant to carry image contents, configuration, host names, addresses, file paths, user names, command arguments or the package list. Most fields could not, because each was a number or a value from a fixed list. Two kinds of field were text:

• The OS name and version fields were short strings. For the source they were taken from its os-release file. They were limited in length and not otherwise filtered.
• error_detail was free text. It is described under the table.

error_detail was filtered twice, once in the binary before sending and again by Vrtmv before storing. The filter replaced what it recognised by shape: file paths, host names and URLs, IP addresses, email addresses and long credential-shaped strings. It was a filter, not a proof. A host name that looks like an ordinary word, or a company name that another tool wrote into an error message, would have passed through, so a stored report may contain one. Deleting an account's reports, as described above, removes them.