Since we exited alpha and released Synapse 0.5.0 last week there's been a flurry of bug fix releases as we ran around firefighting some of the more exciting problems which popped up thanks to merging the federation-auth and event-signing branches.

We released 0.5.3a on Nov 27, which seems to now be pretty stable - if you were holding off on upgrading your homeserver and trying to federate with the new 0.5 release branch, now would be a great time to press the button!

Most excitingly, we believe we have finally fixed the PyNaCL dependency problems which have plagued pretty much anyone setting up a homeserver. This was a problem in PyNaCL itself - huge thanks to Mark for hunting it down and sending the PyNaCL team pull requests to get it fixed. As a result, installing synapse as of 0.5.3a really should be a one-liner at last (please let us know if it isn't!):

pip install --user --process-dependency-links https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tarball/master

The full changelog of what's been going on since 0.5.0 is as follows:

Changes in synapse 0.5.3a (2014-11-27)
=====================================

Depend on a fixed version of PyNaCL
Fix bug that caused joining a remote room to fail if a single event was not
signed correctly.
Fix bug which caused servers to continuously try and fetch events from other
servers.

Changes in synapse 0.5.2 (2014-11-26)

Fix major bug that caused rooms to disappear from people's initial sync.

Changes in synapse 0.5.1 (2014-11-26)
See UPGRADES.rst for specific instructions on how to upgrade.

Fix bug where we served up an Event that did not match its signatures.
Fix regression where we no longer correctly handled the case where a
homeserver receives an event for a room it doesn't recognise (but is in.)