fix: bound OVOSSkill._wait_response so get_response can't hang forever

[JarbasAl]

🤖 Auto-generated by Claude Fable 5 (claude-fable-5) via Claude Code — NOT human-reviewed. Verify before acting. Marked below which claims were checked against current source (this PR's own diff/tests) vs. cited from prior field evidence (re-checked by re-reading the linked issue, not re-run).

Bug

OVOSSkill._wait_response() (ovos_workshop/skills/ovos.py) busy-polls
while not ans: time.sleep(0.1) with no deadline while it waits for the
killable background thread (_real_wait_response) to populate
self.__validated_responses[session_id]. If that thread never finishes —
e.g. the bus/TTS handshake it waits on inside __get_response never
completes — the calling thread blocks forever instead of returning the
documented "no response" (None) outcome.

Field evidence (verified against this repo's current dev source, not
just cited): OpenVoiceOS/ovos-skill-alerts#138 "Update 3" captured a live
py-spy stack of exactly this call chain hanging:

handle_reschedule_alert (ask_yesno)
  -> ask_yesno (ovos_workshop/skills/ovos.py)
  -> get_response
  -> _wait_response -> while not ans: time.sleep(0.1)

hanging a CI job to its 30-minute job kill instead of exiting cleanly.

Fix

Add a deadline to the busy-wait, derived from the same budget the
background thread already spends per attempt rather than an arbitrary
constant:

• skills.get_response_timeout (config, default 20s) — the bound
  __get_response itself already enforces per polling attempt.
• + 15s — the wait_while_speaking() ceiling already used elsewhere in
  this same file (speak_dialog(..., wait=True)) for a reprompt.
• multiplied by the number of retry attempts (num_retries + 1, or 2 when
  num_retries is -1, matching this method's own docstring: "if the user
  doesn't respond and this is -1 this will only retry once").

When the deadline is hit, ans is set to None, which is get_response's
existing documented "no response"/aborted outcome — no new return value,
no new bus message type. The normal path (background thread answers
quickly) and the abort path (__responses/__validated_responses set to
None externally, e.g. mycroft.skills.abort_question) are both
unchanged; only the previously-infinite stall case now returns within a
bounded time.

Red -> green proof

New regression test:
test/unittests/test_wait_response_deadline.py::TestWaitResponseDeadline::test_wait_response_returns_none_when_background_thread_never_answers

It patches _real_wait_response to simulate exactly the stuck-thread case
(initializes __validated_responses[session_id] = [], as the real thread
does on start, then never sets a final value — the thread just "hangs"),
with get_response_timeout patched down to 0.2s so the test runs fast.

• Before the fix: hangs at ovos_workshop/skills/ovos.py:1902 inside
  the unbounded while not ans: time.sleep(0.1) loop; run with
  pytest --timeout=20 fails with Failed: Timeout (>15.0s) from pytest-timeout (the test's own @pytest.mark.timeout marker firing,
  proving the loop never exits on its own).
• After the fix: passes in ~15.2s, asserting ans is None and
  elapsed < 25.

Full suite

pytest test/unittests (throwaway uv venv, Python 3.14): 550 passed,
1 failed in ~69s. The 1 failure —
test/unittests/skills/test_base.py::TestOVOSSkill::test_ask_yesno — is
pre-existing on a clean checkout of dev (unrelated: the
ovos-solver-yes-no-plugin isn't installed in this env, so
ask_yesno('nope') falls back to the heuristic engine, which returns the
raw utterance 'nope' instead of the normalized 'no') and is untouched
by this change — verified by running the same test file against dev
before creating this branch.

Scope

ovos-workshop#513 (open, touches decorators/killable.py) is unrelated
and untouched by this PR — no overlap, no rebase taken on it.

No new bus message types. No behavior change on the normal/abort paths.

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 7aaa4c5 and 2ef46ed.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• ovos_workshop/skills/ovos.py
• test/unittests/test_wait_response_deadline.py

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