v20.2.4 Long live the King

Padatious Intent Parser v0.4.8 #2595

This release of Padatious adds support for saving and loading intent models courtesy of @repodiac, and better handles apostrophes thanks to @stratus-ss.

Voight Kampff updated #2576, #2592

Added support for setting user configurations through Given Steps in the form: "Given the user's {config} is {value}".

Added a clean command to remove any test, step and configuration files that have been copied to the Voight Kampff directory by the test runner. To clean up use ./start-mycroft.sh vktest clear, mycroft-start vktest clear or mycroft-skill-testrunner vktest clear.

Updated dependency handling #2562, #2571, #2575

Added "loose" requirements option, allowing pip install to use ">=" instead of "==" for all packages. This is done by setting the MYCROFT_LOOSE_REQUIREMENTS environment variable. The intention is to make mycroft packaging for linux distributions easier while allowing the git installation to still use a locked set of module versions.

The ever growing requirements.txt has also been split into core requirements, and a range of optional requirements files. This reduces the number of packages being installed unless the system will actually make use of them. It also paves the way for automatic installation of plugin dependencies. Big thanks to @PureTryOut for this one.

Removed xmlrunner as it is no longer used.

Added initial support for XDG Base Directory Specification #2559

Skills will now read and store settings in the XDG_CONFIG_DIR if it is set and the device isn't already using the existing settings location in each Skill directory.

Added support for Alpine Linux installation #2584

The standard setup script will now detect Alpine Linux and install the appropriate dependencies. Another big thanks to @PureTryOut for this and the range of work that has gone into making Mycroft compatible!

Fixed add_context decorator #2577

The @adds_context decorator has optional content that should be passed to the set_context() method. This was not being passed along. This has been resolved with tests added.

Fixed remove_fallback using original handler #2588

Allows the removal of a fallback handler using the original handler, and not the wrapped handler used internally. Along with a range of tests to verify setup and shutdown of Fallback Skills.

Modernize ESpeak TTS #2581

ESpeak output was produced directly from the executable, this is now through the standard TTS output queue like the other TTS modules. This resolves an issue with wait_while_speaking.

Added Polly TTS support - for real this time #2585

This got missed in the last release but is definitely included this time. To get setup check out the documentation. Thanks again to JarbasAl from the Chatterbox team for this one!

Bugfix audio service crashes if started without internet connection #2598

The audio service would crash whilst importing the google_tts module on startup if no internet connection was available as it failed to fetch a list of supported languages. This update prevents the crash and adds a cached to use if the remote list is unavailable.