Note

Medium Risk
Dependency upgrades (especially transformers major version and weaviate-client API shift) can introduce runtime or test regressions; CI runner change may also surface environment-specific failures.

Overview
Bumps the release to 0.21.7 and updates dependency pins in pyproject.toml, notably moving to wrapt 2.x+, transformers 5.x, and weaviate-client 4.x (including constraint updates).

Updates the Weaviate staging integration test to use the weaviate.connect_to_embedded() / collections.* API instead of the legacy Client/schema API. CI unit-test jobs are moved from ubuntu-latest to the opensource-linux-8core runner, and .gitignore now ignores .venv* directories.

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