This Week In Matrix – 2018-05-04

2018-05-04 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Ecosystem Updates

Project Updates

Clients

nheko

nheko, Qt desktop client announced release v0.4.0. From their own changelog:

Basic member list
Basic room settings menu
Support for displaying stickers
Fuzzy search for rooms

https://github.com/mujx/nheko/releases/tag/v0.4.0 for more information.mujx - https://github.com/mujx/nheko - #nheko:matrix.org

Fractal

Fractal have released v0.1.28 - couple of new features plus fixes.

Fractal of course have their in-person meeting coming up soon, and are looking forward to GSoCers getting onboard.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal - #fractal-gtk:matrix.org

neo

f0x is keeping the pace up on neo. New version (alpha0.03), new website!

Rollup of changes since last week includes

settings menu
mentions
unread counts
room invite handling
video thumbnails

and a lot more.f0x - https://github.com/f0x52/neo/ - #neo_client:matrix.org

gomuks

Ever modest, tulir has been tearing through issues and fixes over on gomuks. I'm quite excited to have a matrix-native console client getting up to speed so fast.tulir - https://github.com/tulir/gomuks - #gomuks:maunium.net

Journal

One of the riot developers, luke has a fun side-project called Journal, this being a blogging platform built on matrix.

Says Luke:

The big news this week being that I'm going to redesign the interface to focus on the personal blog use-case, optimising for easy setup and easy blog post sharing. And hopefully push a 1.0 release that I'd be happy to use as my own personal blog.

Worth noting that the linked project page (Journal) is itself a blog using journal (the url might give you a hint of this!)luke - https://journal.ldbco.de/#/journal/journal:ldbco.de

Bridges and other projects

synapse-diaspora-auth

Po Shamil reports an update for synapse-diaspora-auth. New documentation on how to integrate with mxisd, plus email syncing from diaspora.Po Shamil - https://git.fosscommunity.in/necessary129/synapse-diaspora-auth

matrix-appservice-discord

matrix-appservice-discord is now at v0.2.0-rc1.

There are several changes moving this project along, but checking out the change list I can see there were a bunch of contributors to thank, (eeeeeta, Sorunome, TravisR), which is super-cool to see.

Half-Shot - https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord

GTAD

This week kitsune has been focused on 'GTAD (Generate Things from API Description)', which is a code generator for C++, taking API description in Swagger/OpenAPI as it's source. Now at version 0.5, apparently GTAD

can generate correct buildable (and runnable) code to convert data structures used in CS API between JSON and C++ - for the entirety of CS API calls. That basically means that libqmatrixclient gains (so far low-level) C++ CS API for all calls in The Spec and will follow updates to it.

This is super-exciting, especially as we are going to see discussion and progress on the spec...

kitsune - https://github.com/KitsuneRal/gtad/commits/master

Riot/Web

We shipped 0.14.2 as an incremental release
Jitsi by default on the horizon…
Trying to work our way through the regressions which keep stacking up
Lots of work on improved UTs for Groups and Replies; discussion about flux stuff
Next up is E2E verification (at last).

Riot/Mobile

Replies
Sticker sending
Android is now Kotlin enabled!

Synapse

Handling abuse of the depth parameter; short-term fix deployed and longer term coming along shortly.
This destroyed progress on the algorithmic perf improvements.
Half-Shot PRs for negotiating size limits
Amber is inbound!

Dendrite

We're behind on PRs - sorry Thibaut :(

Matrix.org Ops

Ansible stuff is being refactored based on our experiences trying to use it in the wild status.matrix.org is coming soon!

Spec

Loads of work happening to build the Spec Proposals website, tracking workflow for all the proposals in flux and putting them into a formal RFC-style process. It should help community participation in the spec process massively whilst we finalise the longer term governance model for Matrix.org
Also looking at publishing formal roadmaps for Synapse, Dendrite and Riot (at last!) - we have them internally these days but need to just chuck them up on the web and maintain them.
Finally, GDPR work is in full swing.

New(ish) Rooms

This section is scraped manually from #newrooms:matrix.org, though there has not been much activity there this week. Meanwhile, there are a couple of rooms suggested by Creak which deserve some love:

#music-discovery:matrix.org, a place to discuss new music, and
#unity3d:matrix.org, a place for unity3d fans

Before we go

New Core team member

Amber Brown of the Twisted project will be joining the Matrix core team in a few weeks. She'll be focusing on Synapse implementation work, and will bring a lot of Python experience with her. Having someone working full time on synapse will increase others bandwidth for homeserver and spec work.