This Week in Matrix 2018-11-26

A little delay to the release of this week's TWIM, expect us to resume normal schedule on Friday.

Spec & Foundation

• Two workshops happened with the Foundation lawyers to work on MSC1318 - basically fleshing out a proposal for the details of the foundation governance in terms of how the Guardians (i.e. directors of the foundation board) should interact with the Core Spec Team to act as a back-stop - and working out how to port the MSC (once finished) into formal Articles of Association & adjunct documents. We'll get the workshop notes written up as a rewrite of MSC1318 very shortly.
• New MSCs from vdH on:
  • MSC1721 Rename m.login.cas to m.login.sso
  • MSC1730 Mechanism for redirecting to an alternative server during login
• …and an alternate to MSC1730: MSC1731 Mechanism for redirecting to an alternative server during SSO login.
• These three SSO-related MSCs are derived from work being done for a large-scale Matrix deployment for a New Vector customer which we should be able to talk about in future. Improving SSO and other auth/identity work in Matrix is vital, and needless to say we're trying to ensure all the resulting work ends up in the spec to the benefit of the whole ecosystem :)

matrix-media-repo

TravisR reports that:

matrix-media-repo has received a lot of updates in the last few weeks. Although mostly bug fixes and improvements, there's added support for streaming downloads from remote servers. This is mostly useful when someone posts a 100mb video in a room: previously the media repo would download the entire thing then send it over to you. Now it'll send you the video while it also caches it.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Big update from Slavi this week:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has received some updates in the past few weeks - fixing minor bugs, improving documentation, adding support for additional Synapse/Riot features, etc.

Most notably (in oldest to most-recent order):

• Cadair heard you like playbooks, so he made it possible to run the playbook from another playbook. Thanks Cadair!
• some configuration renaming to make things more consistent. Most people would likely be unaffected.
• support has been added for Postgres 11. Upgrading is possible and easy (as a related success story, Aaron Raimist shared that he recently upgraded his ~40GB database)
• more flexible and more secure-by-default TLS configuration. Thanks Aaron Raimist!
• the ability to customize more parts of riot-web. Thanks Aaron Raimist!
• better control over Synapse logging. Thanks Aaron Raimist!
• the ability to set up a public server and the ability to make use of Synapse's \\"auto-join\\" feature. Until now, the playbook was only suited for setting up a private server, but with this, setting up public servers is now a possibility. Thanks @anadahz

I'm quite happy that the playbook is getting more contributions from others now and is improving in such diverse ways!

Additionally, the #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:devture.com support room in Matrix is now bridged to the #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy IRC Freenode channel, making it easier for people to get support when they don't have a working homeserver.

libQMatrixClient

kitsune has been working on libQMatrixClient:

the work on lazy-loading in libQMatrixClient has advanced to the point when client authors may start trying to integrate it in their applications (welcome to #qmatrixclient:matrix.org for details - it's a bit rough around the edges yet).

Spectral

This week Black Hat has been working to give Spectral a more Material design oriented UI.

SMSMatrix

swedneck reports that:

SMSMatrix now has a room (#smsmatrix:matrix.org). SMSMatrix is a simple bridge between Matrix and SMS, developed by tijder. You install an android app and register a bot account which will invite you to direct chats under the name of anyone who sends you an SMS, which will then act as a normal SMS conversation.

I had a very quick play with this tool and it works great - a good way to quickly bridge SMS to Matrix.

Riot

News from the Riot teams:

• Android rewrite is continuing in Kotlin - lots of infrastructure work over the last few weeks
• E2E key backups landed in Riot/iOS develop (but no UI yet, as we finalise the implementation first on Riot/Web)
• E2E key backups also landed in Riot/Web develop (but with placeholder UI)
• E2E key backups in dev on Riot/Android too (using Realm for storage!)
• Lots of work from uhoreg on E2E cross-signing
• Work on the Riot/Web redesign paused for a week due to other commitments but as of Nov 26th we're back on the case again, making up for lost time.

Synapse

Most of the focus from the Synapse team this week has been on the new version using Python 3:

• Py3 is finished, other than Debian packages - ongoing debate on whether they should use a virtualenv or depend on debian dependencies, and who should maintain them in a Py3 world…
• Lots of running around on final Py3 bugs

matrix-appservice-purple

Half-Shot has continued work on matrix-appservice-purple.

Modular

Modular.im provides Hosted Homeservers for Matrix.

• Modular now has full support for Custom DNS (letting you point your own SRV records at it)
• Lots of work on a migration tool to allow folks to easily shift Matrix accounts between servers, as well as (in future) migrations from HipChat, Slack & others.

That's it!

Apologies for the delayed release this week - please expect an episode of Matrix Live in the week, and back to a normal schedule for TWIM as of Friday. As always, come talk to us in #thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org and tell us what you've been doing.