Adapted community discussion: Paraphrased and condensed from an anonymized public OpenClaw Discord support conversation from August 2026. Technical guidance was reviewed for OpenClaw 2026.9.3.
My update stops during Doctor because the migrated multi-agent roster has no explicit owner. The report also says a legacy exec-approvals file must be migrated. The package version itself did not change.
Choose the ownership model before rerunning the migration. For a true multi-agent fleet, set explicit ownership. For a single primary agent, mark that agent as the deliberate default instead. Do not combine both patterns. Then run Doctor and config validation before retrying the update.
The config command is blocked because the existing file is already invalid. The validator lists several retired metadata, Gateway, command, and plugin keys in addition to the missing ownership setting.
Back up the config first. If openclaw config set cannot run because validation happens before the write, add the ownership field manually inside the top-level agents object, alongside defaults and entries. Then run openclaw doctor --fix and openclaw config validate. Let Doctor migrate fields with supported replacements rather than deleting whole sections.
The config now validates. The remaining warnings say heartbeats have no ambient owner and the old agent list was moved. The package update succeeds, but the post-update Doctor still stops on the legacy approvals migration.
The ownership repair is complete. Heartbeats can remain disabled unless you want a chosen agent to perform periodic monitoring. The remaining approvals warning is a separate migration problem. Preserve the legacy file, stop the Gateway before any supported import, and confirm the imported policy before moving the original aside. If the current release cannot converge that migration, stop and use the documented update-repair path rather than repeatedly deleting or rewriting approval state.