Covers the P0 finding that the package cannot read the corpus remotely at
all -- no working default URL, and Hive globs are unsupported over generic
HTTP by DuckDB 1.5.5. Fix is manifest-driven file enumeration (measured:
46,148,034 rows over plain https, identical to the hf:// glob) plus a
working public default.
Also: seven release-readiness fixes, a README restructured for a stranger,
NEWS rewritten as an initial release rather than a pre-release churn log,
and the Gitea-canonical/GitHub-mirror/r-universe distribution mechanics.