spec: fallback.md — bounded polls with RECOMMENDED ceiling, malformed-pong decline, broadcast-poll equivalence

[JarbasAl]

Refines OVOS-FALLBACK-1 for internal purity and self-consistency (per-file split of the consistency audit).

Changes

• Bounded polls, tunable ceiling (§6.1): the plugin MUST bound each per-skill wait — an unbounded wait stalls the whole utterance behind one unresponsive skill — while the ceiling itself is a RECOMMENDED default of 0.5 s (matching the analogous OVOS-CONVERSE-1 §4.2 and OVOS-STOP-1 §4.1 polls), deployer-adjustable.
• Absent/malformed pong = can_handle: false (§6.1): silence, a missing or non-boolean can_handle, or a mismatched skill_id all decline and skip — uniform with the companion protocols' silence rules.
• Broadcast-poll optimisation (§6.1): a single broadcast to the effective pool is permitted as an observably equivalent alternative to the sequential cycle — selection stays keyed on pool order, never response-arrival order, so outcomes are identical while waits overlap.
• Priority bands stay RECOMMENDED (§3.3): the three confidence tiers are a convention; different band conventions map by band membership, not numeric rescale. Catch-all last-entry ordering stated as SHOULD.
• Topic rule: registration events and ping/pong are dotted non-dispatch topics; the only colon topic is the genuine dispatch <skill_id>:fallback.
• §6.3 utterance = first element of the candidate list (PIPELINE-1 §4.1); cross-protocol note that the poll boolean's name (can_handle) is protocol-local; citations corrected (blacklisted_skills → PIPELINE-1 §5.3, session registry → SESSION-1 §2.2, ovos.intent.unmatched → PIPELINE-1 §9.3; SESSION-1 canonical title).

Principle

MUST/MUST NOT mark correctness/interop invariants (bounded waits, pool-order selection, decline-on-malformed); numbers (ceilings, priority bands) are RECOMMENDED defaults. Colon <x>:<y> is reserved for the orchestrator dispatch shape (MSG-1 §2.1.1); polls and registrations are dotted.

Version stays 2: VERSIONING.md defines the field as the V0-compatibility class, which these edits do not change.

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