Migrating Through the ovos-workshop 7.0.0 Release Train¶

In a nutshell

Skill maintainers are affected. Four ovos-workshop major versions landed in about a day (4.0.0 → 7.0.0), each breaking a different part of the OVOSSkill family, and the later-removed CommonQuerySkill belongs to the same train. Fix it by applying all four OVOSSkill changes at once and dropping CommonQuerySkill in favor of the pipeline-plugin approach.

The ovos-workshop 2025-06 release train (4.0.0 → 7.0.0)¶

ovos-workshop went through four major-version breaks on the OVOSSkill family in the space of about a day, each one landing on top of the last before the previous change had even settled. A skill author jumping the gap felt it as a moving target: can_answer went abstract, converse moved out to its own base class, can_stop briefly went hard-abstract then was loosened hours later, and that new base class's own method name turned out to be wrong for about a day before being renamed. Anyone upgrading past a pre-2025-06 workshop version in one hop needs to treat all four changes as landing at once, not as separable steps.

Four major versions of ovos-workshop shipped on the same day (2025-06-07/08). Each is a separate breaking change to the OVOSSkill family. If you are jumping from a pre-2025-06 workshop version to anything after 7.0.0, expect all four of these to apply at once.

v4.0.0: FallbackSkill.can_answer becomes mandatory. (At 4.0.0 the base implementation raised NotImplementedError at runtime; true abc.ABCMeta enforcement — the skill refusing to load without an implementation — arrived later, in 9.3.9a1. See Fallback Skills.)

# old: default True if any handler registered, no override needed
class MySkill(FallbackSkill):
    def handle_fallback(self, message):
        ...

# new: must implement can_answer explicitly
class MySkill(FallbackSkill):
    def can_answer(self, utterances: list[str], lang: str) -> bool:
        return True  # or real logic
    def handle_fallback(self, message):
        ...

FallbackSkill.make_intent_failure_handler(cls, bus) (the old mycroft-style bus-driven fallback dispatcher) is removed with it (ovos-workshop c066bc3, #336).

v5.0.0: converse moves out of OVOSSkill into its own base class.

# old: converse lived directly on OVOSSkill
class MySkill(OVOSSkill):
    def converse(self, message=None):
        ...

# new: subclass ConversationalSkill (it already extends OVOSSkill)
from ovos_workshop.skills.converse import ConversationalSkill

class MySkill(ConversationalSkill):
    def can_converse(self, message) -> bool:
        return True
    def converse(self, message=None):
        ...

An OVOSSkill subclass that overrides converse() without also inheriting ConversationalSkill compiles fine but is silently never called by the pipeline (ovos-workshop f725f5e, #339).

v6.0.0 / v6.0.1: can_stop conditional abstract method. can_stop(self, message) briefly became a hard @abc.abstractmethod (10f9781, #344) then was loosened the same day to only require overriding if the skill also overrides stop/stop_session (813f7b5, #346, released as 6.0.1). If you implement stop() or stop_session(), also implement can_stop().

v7.0.0: can_answer on ConversationalSkill renamed to can_converse. The v5.0.0 base class shipped with the wrong method name for about a day. Rename can_answer → can_converse in any ConversationalSkill subclass (ovos-workshop 1fdd532, #348).

Lifecycle:

Change	Active	Deprecated but functional	Dropped
`FallbackSkill.can_answer` concrete/optional	before `4.0.0` (2025-06-07)	unverified	`4.0.0`
`converse()` on `OVOSSkill` directly	before `5.0.0` (2025-06-07)	unverified	`5.0.0`
`stop_is_implemented` property / concrete `can_stop`	before `6.0.0`	`6.0.1` (conditional requirement)	`6.0.0` (briefly hard), loosened in `6.0.1`
`ConversationalSkill.can_answer`	`5.0.0` to `6.0.1` (about one day)	none	`7.0.0`

CommonQuerySkill removal¶

CommonQuerySkill sat deprecation-flagged for the better part of two years before it was finally cut in one commit. There is no successor class, but ovos-workshop still ships the replacement: the @common_query decorator on a plain OVOSSkill. The removal only completed a migration that had already happened underneath it: the matching hardcoded common-query wiring inside ovos-core itself had been pulled out earlier, when the whole intent-service module turned into a config-driven OPM pipeline factory, so by the time the skill class was deleted, common-query matching already lived in whichever pipeline plugin happened to own it.

CommonQuerySkill had been deprecation-flagged since ovos-workshop 4.0.0 and was deleted entirely (259 lines, including the CQSMatchLevel enum and CQS_match_query_phrase/CQS_action abstract methods) in 6382d0a (#400, 2026-04-08), months after the 8.0.0 release, first shipping in 8.0.4a3. There is no successor class: a plain OVOSSkill joins common-query by decorating a method with @common_query() (the removed class's own deprecation warning said exactly this). The matching and ranking are dispatched by the common-query pipeline plugin. On ovos-core itself, the equivalent hardcoded common-query wiring was removed from ovos_core.intent_services in 62024dbf98 (#690, 2025-06-10, first stable release 2.1.0) when the whole intent-service module became a config-driven OPM pipeline factory.

Lifecycle:

Change	Active	Deprecated but functional	Dropped
`ovos_workshop.skills.common_query_skill.CommonQuerySkill`	before `4.0.0`	`4.0.0` until removal	`6382d0a` (2026-04-08, post-`8.0.0`, `8.0.4a3`)
`ovos-core` hardcoded common-query wiring	before `62024dbf98`	unverified	`62024dbf98` (`2.1.0`, 2025-06-10)