Roll up, roll up, get it while it's hot, Synapse 0.33.4 is here.
This release brings together a whole host of bug fixes, some enhancements to resource usage management and a bunch of internal changes in readiness for room member state lazy loading and our ongoing port to Python 3 (we are hoping to ship a py3 test candidate rsn!).
Ben's away today, so this TWIM is brought to you mainly in association with Cadair's TWIMbot!
Spec Activity
Since last week's sprint to get the new spec releases out, focus on the core team has shifted exclusively to the remaining stuff needed to cut the first stable release for the Server-Server API. In practice this means fleshing out the MSCs in flight and implementing them - work has progressed on both improving auth rules, switching event IDs to be hashes and others. Whilst implementing this in Synapse we're also doing a complete audit and overhaul of the current federation code, hence the 0.33.3.1 security release this week.
Meanwhile, in the community, ma1uta reports:
I am working on the jeon (java matrix api) to update it to the latest stable release. Also I changed versions of api to form rX.Y.Z-N where rX.Y.Z is a API version and N is a library version within API. So, I have prepared Push API (r0.1.0-1), Identity API (r0.1.0-1) and Appservice API (r0.1.0-1) for the first release and current updating the C2S API to the r0.4.0 version.
XMPP Bridging
Are you in the market for a Matrix-XMPP bridge? When I say "market", I mean it because this week we have two announcements for bridging to XMPP! You can choose whether you'd prefer your bridge to be implemented as a puppet, or a bot.
It is a double-puppet bridge which can connects the Matrix and XMPP ecosystems. Just invite the @_xmpp_master:ru-matrix.org and tell him: @_xmpp_master: connect [email protected] to connect current room with the specified conference. You can ask about this bridge in the #matrix-jabber-java-bridge:ru-matrix.org room. Currently supports only conferences and only m.text messages. 1:1 conversations and other message types will be later.
maze appeared this week and announced MxBridge, a new Matrix-XMPP bridge:
It works as a bot, so it is non-puppeting. Rooms can be mapped dynamically by the bot administrator(s). There is no support for 1-1 chats (yet). MxBridge is written as a multi-process application in Elixir and it should scale quite well (but don't tie me down on it ;)). https://github.com/djmaze/mxbridge
Seaglass
Neil powers onwards with Seaglass, with updates this week including:
Displaying stickers
Lazy-loading room history on startup to help with performance
Scrollback support (both forwards and backwards)
Support for Matthew's Account (aka retries on initial sync for those of us with massive initial syncs, and general perf improvements to nicely support >2000 rooms)
Better avatar support & cosmetics on macOS Mojave
Encryption verification support, device blacklisting and message information
Ability to turn encryption on in rooms
Responding to encryption being turned on in rooms
Paranoid mode for encryption (only send to verified devices)
Invitation support (both in UI and /invite)
Matrique
Blackhat announces that Matrique's new design is almost done, along with GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows nightly build!
Fractal
Alexandre Franke says:
Fractal 3.30 got release alongside the rest of GNOME. It includes a bunch of new and updated translations, and redacted messages are now hidden.
Meanwhile, hidden in this screenshot, uhoreg noted that E2E plans are progressing...
Riot
Bruno has been hacking away on Riot/Web squashing the remaining Lazy Loading Members defects and various related optimisations and fixes. We also released Riot/Web 0.16.3 as a fairly minor point release (which unfortunately has a regression with DM avatars, which is fixed in 0.16.4, for which a first RC was cut a few hours ago and should be released on Monday). Meanwhile the first cut of Lazy Loading also got implemented on Android as well. Both are hidden behind labs flags, but we're almost at a point where we can turn it on now! Otherwise, the Riot team has got sucked into working on commercial Matrix stuff, for better or worse (all shall be revealed shortly though!)
Construct
Jason has been working heavily on Construct, and has new test users. Construct is able to federate with Synapse and the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. mujx has created a docker for Construct which streamlines its deployment.
tulir has now deployed using the standalone install instructions on a very small LXC VM using ZFS. Unfortunately ZFS does not support O_DIRECT (direct disk IO) which is how Construct achieves maximum performance using concurrent reads. This is not a problem though when using an SSD or for personal deployments. I'll be posting more about how Construct hacked RocksDB to use direct IO, which can get the most out of your hardware with multiple requests in-flight (even with an SSD).
Synapse
Work was split this week into spec/security work, with the critical update for 0.33.3.1 - if you haven't upgraded, please do so immediately.
Otherwise, Hawkowl has been on a mission to finish the Python 3 port, which is now almost merged. Testers should probably wait until it fully merges to the develop branch and we'll yell about it then, but impatient adrenaline enthusiasts may want to check out the hawkowl/py3-3 branch (although it may explode in your face, mangle your DB and format your cat, and probably misses lots of recent important PRs like the 0.33.3.1 stuff). However, i've been running a variant on some servers for the last few days without problems - and it seems (placebo effect notwithstanding) incredibly snappy...
Meanwhile, the Lazy Loaded Member implementation got sped up by 2-3x, which makes /sync roughly 2-3x faster than it would be without Lazy Loading. This hasn't merged yet, but was the main final blocker behind Lazy Loading going live!
In addition, Matrix Synapse is now more configurable from the playbook, with support for enabling stats-reporting, event cache size configurability, password peppering.
Matrix Python SDK needs a maintainer
We should say a huge Thank You to &Adam for his work leading the Python SDK over the previous months! Unfortunately due to a busy home life (best of luck for the second child!) he has decided to step down as lead maintainer. Anyone interested in this project should head to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-python-sdk/issues/279, and also come and chat in #matrix-python-sdk:matrix.org.
A new bot appears! Are you a pedantic academic who likes to correct others' misuse of Latin-derived plurals? This task can now be automated for you by means of SingularBot! Also for people who just like to have some fun. Free PongBot and SmileBot included.
kitsune on Hokkaido island
I ended up being on Hokkaido island right when a major earthquake struck it; so no activity on Matrix from me in the nearest couple of days. Also, donations to GlobalGiving for the disaster relief are welcome because people are really struggling here (abusing the communication channel, sorry).
Matrix Live
...has got delayed again; sorry - we're rather overloaded atm. We'll catch up as soon as we can.
As referenced in yesterday's pre-disclosure, today we are releasing Synapse 0.33.3.1 as a critical security update.
We have patched two security vulnerabilities we identified whilst working on the upcoming r0 spec release for the Server-Server API (see details below). We do not believe either have been exploited in the wild, but strongly recommend everybody running a federated Synapse upgrades immediately.
Many thanks for your patience and understanding; with fixes like this we are moving ever closer to Synapse reaching a 1.0 Thanks also to the package maintainers who have coordinated with us to ensure distro packages are available for a speedy upgrade!
Note, for anyone running Debian Jessie, we have prepared a 0.33.2.1 deb (as 0.33.3 dropped support for Jessie).
Synapse 0.33.3.1 (2018-09-06)
SECURITY FIXES
Fix an issue where event signatures were not always correctly validated (#3796)
Fix an issue where server_acls could be circumvented for incoming events (#3796)
Internal Changes
Unignore synctl in .dockerignore to fix docker builds (#3802)
During the ongoing work to finalise a stable release of Matrix's Server-Server federation API, we've been doing a full audit of Synapse's implementation and have identified a serious vulnerability which we are going to release a security update to address (Synapse 0.33.3.1) on
Thursday Sept 6th 2018 at 12:00 UTC.
We are coordinating with package maintainers to ensure that patched versions of packages will be available at that time - meanwhile, if you run your own Synapse, please be prepared to upgrade as soon as the patched versions are released. All previous versions of Synapse are affected, so everyone will want to upgrade.
Thank you for your time, patience and understanding while we resolve the issue,
Recently I've been working to improve some of the content on the matrix.org website.
Firstly the FAQ now has updated content and a more presentable menu.
We have a Guides Index, which includes a clarified guide list, plus links to off-site contributions from the community. It's possible to click "recommend" on these items if you've had a good experience with them. If you have documentation or guides you'd like to see added to the list, contact me on Matrix or make a pull request on the site repo.
Finally, as part of a programme to improve visibility on projects in the Matrix ecosystem, we are introducing the "Matrix Clients Matrix". This is a list of some of the most popular current Matrix clients in the ecosystem today, and should shed some light on current feature statuses! The list is not exhaustive, and if you would like to see your client project included, please contact me at the same address, or come chat in the Matrix Client Developers community room. Pretty green Features grid:
Introducing Client Server API 0.4, and the first ever stable IS, AS and Push APIs spec releases!
Hi folks,
As many know, we've been on a massive sprint to improve the spec - both fixing omissions where features have been implemented in the reference servers but were never formalised in the spec, and fixing bugs where the spec has thinkos which stop us from being able to ratify it as stable and thus fit for purpose .
In practice, our target has been to cut stable releases of all the primary Matrix APIs by the end of August - effectively declaring Matrix out of beta, at least at the specification level. For context: historically only one API has ever been released as stable - the Client Server API, which was the result of a similar sprint back in Jan 2016. This means that the Server Server (SS) API, Identity Service (IS) API, Application Service (AS) API and Push Gateway API have never had an official stable release - which has obviously been problematic for those implementing them.
However, as of the end of Friday Aug 31, we're proud to announce the first ever stable releases of the IS, AS and Push APIs!
To the best of our knowledge, these API specs are now complete and accurately describe all the current behaviour implemented in the reference implementations (sydent, synapse and sygnal) and are fit for purpose. Any deviation from the spec in the reference implementations should probably be considered a bug in the impl. All changes take the form of filling in spec omissions and adding clarifications to the existing behaviour in order to get things to the point that an independent party can implement these APIs without having to refer to anything other than the spec.
This is the result of a lot of work which spans the whole Spec Core Team, but has been particularly driven by TravisR, who has taken the lead on this whole mission to improve the spec. Huge thanks are due to Travis for his work here, and also massive thanks to everyone who has sufferedendured reviewed his PRs and contributed to the releases. The spec is looking unrecognisably better for it - and Matrix 1.0 is feeling closer than ever!
Alongside the work on the IS/AS/Push APIs, there has also been a massive attempt to plug all the spec omissions in the Client Server API. Historically the CS API releases have missed some of the newer APIs (and of course always miss the ones which postdate a given release), but we've released the APIs which /have/ been specified as stable in order to declare them stable. However, in this release we've tried to go through and fill in as many remaining gaps as possible.
The result is the release of Client Server API version 0.4. This is a huge update - increasing the size of the CS API by ~40%. The biggest new stuff includes fully formalising support for end-to-end encryption (thanks to Zil0!), versioning for rooms (so we can upgrade rooms to new versions of the protocol), synchronised read markers, user directories, server ACLs, MSISDN 3rd party ids, and .well-known server discovery (not that it's widely used yet), but for the full picture, best bet is to look at the changelog (now managed by towncrier!). It's probably fair to say that the CS API is growing alarmingly large at this point - Chrome says that it'd be 223 A4 pages if printed. Our solution to this will be to refactor it somehow (and perhaps switch to a more compact representation of the contents).
Some things got deliberately missed from the CS 0.4 release: particularly membership Lazy Loading (because we're still testing it out and haven't released it properly in the wild yet), the various GDPR-specific APIs (because they may evolve a bit as we refine them since the original launch), finalising ID grammars in the overall spec (because this is surprisingly hard and subtle and we don't want to rush it) and finally Communities (aka Groups), as they are still somewhat in flux.
Meanwhile, on the Server to Server API, there has also been a massive amount of work. Since the beginning of July it's
tripled in size as we've filled in the gaps, over the course of >200 commits (>150 of which from Travis). If you take a look at the current snapshot it's pretty unrecognisable from the historical draft; with the main changes being:
Adding the new State Resolution algorithm to address flaws in the original one. This has been where much of our time has gone - see MSC1442 for full details. Adopting the new algorithm requires rooms to be recreated; we'll write more about this in the near future when we actually roll it out.
Adding room versioning so we can upgrade to the new State Resolution algorithm.
Everything is now properly expressed as Swagger (OpenAPI), just like the CS API
Adding all the details for E2E encryption (including dependencies like to-device messaging and device-list synchronisation)
Improvements in specifying how to authorize inbound events over federation
Document federation APIs such as /event_auth and /query_auth and /get_missing_events
However, we haven't finished it all: despite our best efforts we're running slightly past the original target of Aug 31. The current state of play for the r0 release overall (in terms of pending issues) is:
...and you can see the full breakdown over at the public Github project dashboard.
The main stuff we still have remaining on the Server/Server API at this point is:
Better specifying how we validate inbound events. See MSC1646 for details & progress.
Switching event IDs to be hashes. See MSC1640 for details and progress.
Various other remaining security considerations (e.g. how to handle malicious auth events in the DAG; how to better handle DoS situations).
Merging in the changes to authoring m.room.power_levels (as per MSC1304)
Formally specifying the remaining identifiers which lack a formal grammar - MSC1597 and particularly room aliases (
MSC1608)
The plan here is to continue speccing and implementing these at top priority (with Travis continuing to work fulltime on spec work), and we'll obviously keep you up-to-date on progress. Some of the changes here (e.g. event IDs) are quite major and we definitely want to implement them before speccing them, so we're just going to have to keep going as fast as we can. Needless to say we want to cut an r0 of the S2S API alongside the others asap and declare Matrix out of beta (at least at the spec level :)
In terms of visualising progress on this spec mission it's interesting to look at the rate at which we've been closing PRs: this graph shows the total number of PRs which are in state ‘open' or ‘closed' on any given day:
...which clearly shows the original sprint to get the r0 of the CS API out the door at the end 2015, and then a more leisurely pace until the beginning of July 2018 since which the pace has picked up massively. Other ways of looking at include the number of open issues...
...or indeed the number of commits per week…
...or the overall Github Project activity for August. (It's impressive to see Zil0 sneaking in there on second place on the commit count, thanks to all his GSoC work documenting E2E encryption in the spec as part of implementing it in matrix-python-sdk!)
Anyway, enough numerology. It's worth noting that all of the dev for r0 has generally followed the proposed Open Governance Model for Matrix, with the core spec team made up of both historical core team folk (erik, richvdh, dave & matthew), new core team folk (uhoreg & travis) and community folk (kitsune, anoa & mujx) working together to review and approve the changes - and we've been doing MSCs (albeit with an accelerated pace) for anything which we feel requires input from the wider community. Once the Server/Server r0 release is out the door we'll be finalising the open governance model and switching to a slightly more measured (but productive!) model of spec development as outlined there.
Meanwhile, Matrix 1.0 gets ever closer. With (almost) all this spec mission done, our plan is to focus more on improving the reference implementations - particularly performance in Synapse,
UX in matrix-{'{'}react,ios,android{'}'}-sdk as used by Riot (especially for E2E encryption), and then declare a 1.0 and get back to implementing new features (particularly Editable Messages and Reactions) at last.
We'd like to thank everyone for your patience whilst we've been playing catch up on the spec, and hope you agree it's been worth the effort :)
As many know, we've been aiming for the end of August to cut the first ever stable releases of the remaining APIs in the spec which have up to now been marked unstable - i.e. providing a snapshot of the spec which correctly matches the reference implementations (other than implementation bugs) and which can be used in isolation to develop production grade implementations of clients, servers, etc without need to reference any other implementations. There's been a massive sprint to pull this together, and as of the time of writing there are still PRs and commits landing every few minutes. We'll post a full update on our progress on Monday; meanwhile you can see a sneak peek over at the August 2018 r0 project board.
Spec work has completely precluded any other backend dev this week.
Half-Shot, gone but not really gone
This week we say farewell to Half-Shot, who has been working fulltime on bridges over the summer. He has managed the matrix.org bridges largely single-handedly, with a big focus on the often-volatile IRC bridge(s).
now bridges a lot more stuff, such as formatting, media and replies. I'm also almost done with desegregating users so that Matrix users join the same group chat portals rather than everyone having their own portal to the same chat
Zulip chat, bridged by Zulip
Matthew discovered there is a Matrix-Zulip bridge on the Zulip side. So if you're running a Zulip server (for some reason), and want to bridge with Matrix check out the integration docs here.
IRC Connection Tracker
Half-Shot created a new component to enhance the reliability of IRC-Matrix bridging:
IRC Connection Tracker is a thing now. It's a project to separate out the IRC connections from the appservice so the two can be run independently, so that restarting the appservice doesn't affect the IRC connections. It's hopefully going to allow bridge stuff to run faster when it's done.
This project is still really early stage. You can take a look at the Proposal document here.
Fractal 3.29.92 got released and we are freezing strings to give GNOME translators a bit of time to complete translations for 3.30 next week. Latest developments include tweaks for the title bar, misc bug fixes, a new presentation for uploaded files (that are not images, those are still displayed inline) with buttons to download or open them.
Development builds are now parallel installable for easier testing and CI has been improved.
Seaglass now has some early support for inline images and attachments, and supports Quick Look. Also handles emotes and notices better. It also has version numbers now, various other little fixes and Aaron Raimist has been working on auto-update support.
There's also been some work on supporting dark mode on Mojave (which looks particularly sexy) and even Touch Bar support!
Riot Android v0.8.15
Riot Android v0.8.15 is on it's way to the Play Store.
Changes in Riot Android 0.8.15 (2018-08-30)
MatrixSdk:
Upgrade to version 0.9.9.
Improvements:
Improve intent to open document (#2544)
Avoid useless dialog for permission (#2331)
Improve wording when exporting keys (#2289)
Other changes:
Upgrade lib libphonenumber from v8.0.1 to 8.9.12
Upgrade Google firebase libs
Bugfix:
Handle \\/ at the beginning of a message to send a message starting with / (#658)
Escape nicknames starting with a forward slash / in mentions (#2146)
Improve management of Push feature
MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547 point 2)
Changes in Riot Android 0.8.14 (2018-08-27)
MatrixSdk:
Upgrade to version 0.9.8.
Features:
Manage server quota notices (#2440)
Improvements:
Do not ask permission to write external storage at startup (#2483)
Update settings icon and transparent logo for notifications and navigation drawer (#2492)
URL previews are no longer requested from the server when displaying URL previews is disabled (PR #2514)
Fix some plural and puzzle strings, and remove other unused ones (#2444)
Manage System Alerts in a dedicated section
Other changes:
Upgrade olm-sdk.aar from version 2.2.2 to version 2.3.0
move PieFractionView from the SDK to the client (#2525)
Bugfix:
Fix media sharing (#2530)
Fix notification sound issue in settings (#2524)
Disable app icon badge for "listen for event" notification (#2104)
Riot iOS 0.7.3
Changes in 0.7.3 (2018-08-27)
Improvements:
Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.3).
Bug fix:
Fix input toolbar reset in RoomViewController on MXSession state change (#2006 and #2008).
Fix user interaction disabled in master view of UISplitViewController when selecting a room (#2005).
Changes in 0.7.2 (2018-08-24)
Improvements:
Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.2).
Server Quota Notices in Riot (#1937).
Bug fix:
User defaults: the preset application language (if any) is ignored.
Recents: Avoid to open a room twice (it crashed on room creation on quick HSes).
Riot-bot: Do not try to create a room with it if the user homeserver is not federated.
Riot Web
There's been lots of work debugging and optimising Lazy Loading, which is edging closer to being turned on by default. We've also been working away at improving E2E UX - starting with finishing key backup, and then improved verification, and then finally cross-signing (at last!)
Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.9 (2018-08-30)
Improvements:
Clear unreachable Url when clearing media cache (vector-im/riot-android#2479)
"In reply to" is not clickable on Riot Android yet. Make it a plain text (vector-im/riot-android#2469)
Bugfix:
Removing room from 'low priority' or 'favorite' does not work (vector-im/riot-android#2526)
MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547)
API Change:
MxSession constructor is now private. Please use MxSession.Builder() to create a MxSession
Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.8 (2018-08-27)
Features:
Manage server_notices tag and server quota notices (vector-im/riot-android#2440)
Bugfix:
Room aliases including the '@' and '=' characters are now recognized as valid (vector-im/riot-android#2079, vector-im/riot-android#2542)
Room name and topic can be now set back to empty (vector-im/riot-android#2345)
API Change:
Remove PieFractionView class from the Matrix SDK. This class is now in Riot sources (#336)
MXMediasCache.createTmpMediaFile() methods are renamed to createTmpDecryptedMediaFile()
MXMediasCache.clearTmpCache() method is renamed to clearTmpDecryptedMediaCache()
Add MXMediasCache.moveToShareFolder() to move a tmp decrypted file to another folder to prevent deletion during sharing. New API MXMediasCache.clearShareDecryptedMediaCache() can be called when the application is resumed. (vector-im/riot-android#2530)
Matrix iOS SDK
Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.3 (2018-08-27)
Bug fix:
MXJSONModel: Manage m.server_notice empty tag sent due to a bug server side (PR #556).
Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.2 (2018-08-24)
Improvements:
MXSession: Add the supportedMatrixVersions method getting versions of the specification supported by the homeserver.
MXRestClient: Add testUserRegistration to check earlier if a username can be registered.
MXSession: Add MXSessionStateSyncError state and MXSession.syncError to manage homeserver resource quota on /sync requests (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
MXError: Add kMXErrCodeStringResourceLimitExceeded to manage homeserver resource quota (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
MXError: Define constant strings for keys and values that can be found in a Matrix JSON dictionary error.
Tests: MXHTTPClient_Private.h: Add method to set fake delay in HTTP requests.
Bug fix:
People tab is empty in the share extension (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1988).
MXError: MXError lost NSError.userInfo information.
Thank you to Half-Shot for all your work on Bridges over the last months and beyond. Today is your last day, but I'm sure we'll see you again before long. Text below is from Half-Shot.
Today marks my last day of my 3 month internship at New Vector (the startup which hires many of the core Matrix team). For those of you who haven't been reading Ben's fabulous blog posts, I've been working exclusively on bridges; in particular the IRC bridge.
Tasked with the goal of making it crash less and run faster, I hope that the evidence is visible and people are generally having a better experience on it!
Some stats pulled from the matrix-appservice-irc repo:
39 PRs closed (4 remain open)
27 issues closed, 27 issues opened.
334 commits, averaging 7.6 commits a PR.
Commits this year:
But aside from showing off some stats, I wanted to mention all the new features:
Replies on Matrix translate well to IRC, or as well as IRC allows.
People mentioning your IRC nick now ping your matrix user, finally!
So. Many. Metrics. Everything you wanted to know about the internals of the bridge, but were too afraid to --inspect.
Not spamming homeservers with join requests on startup (it makes for a happy ops team).
No longer are IRC users shackled to a "(IRC)" extension on their displayname, you can be who you want
with group flairs!
Support for node 4 has been dropped, and support for 6,8 and 10 has been assured.
On the matrix-appservice-bridge side, I optimised some calls to cache locally and avoid hitting the homeserver too often, and disabling presence for homeservers that don't support it.
There are future plans to make bridging more visible to Matrix Clients as a first class citizen. Ideas like speccing a state event (MSC1410) so that bridges can interact with each other properly and clients can create full bridge management views which are still decentralised from an integration manager.
I'd like to give a shoutout to Travis who has reviewed nearly all my changes that have made their way into the bridge, on top of all the other tasks he has on his plate. And of course a thank you to all of the Matrix team who have been very supportive during my time here.
Big week for Synapse: v0.33.3 was released this week. You'll find preparation for support for Lazy Loading and Room Versioning, lots of bugfixes, and a great contribution from vojeroen: support for sending SNI over federation for vhosted servers. More complete change log here, features below:
Add support for the SNI extension to federation TLS connections. Thanks to @vojeroen! (#3439)
A large chunk of e2e has landed in the spec, largely thanks to Zil0's work. There are still some things left, but the main bits related to sending encrypted messages is in there. Attachments and key sharing are being reviewed today
TravisR progressed on Push, Application Services, and Client-Server APIs.
accumulates Russian translates of Matrix FAQ and manuals, and other info about Matrix in Russian. Also we starts a public Matrix Synapse server for Russian users with free open registration
Russian Matrix users: feel free to add and complement articles in our wiki to make Matrix more friendly for Russian users.
Client News
Seaglass
neilalexander has been on a roll the last few weeks working on Seaglass, the macOS-native client:
Seaglass now has support for creating, joining and leaving rooms, and accepting/rejecting room invites, redacting messages, improvements to the room settings pages, timestamps, some visual tweaks, lots of bug fixes, early support for detecting failed message sends, scrolling improvements
Lazy Loading (LL) is available on develop behind the LABS flag, and is being polished. It will probably not make it to next release, but it's progressing!
Riot Mobile
New releases are imminent for both Android and iOS:
iOS: bug fixes and Lazy Loading in settings
Android: bug fixes, better management of permission requests at startup
Shared Secret Auth and Matrix Corporal
Slavi has been working on several operations tools for Synapse. Firstly Shared Secret Auth password provider module for Matrix Synapse.
It allows external systems (which know the shared secret) to easily obtain access tokens for any user hosted on the homeserver. This is incredibly useful for all sorts of automation (no more pre-generated access tokens or plain-text passwords).
With this tool, you can pass a mxid, and get back an access_token for that user. With this, you can do whatever actions would normally be done with a token. For example, you for a new starter at a company, you could join a set of rooms known to be needed by new starters.
Next, he has released Matrix Corporal, reconciliator and gateway for a managed Matrix server:
It's a way to take control of Matrix (Synapse) in a corporate (or other such) environment. Based on a configuration policy (generated by an external system, like your intranet), it can auto-create and auto-disable users, keep their profile and authentication details to date, auto-join/leave users to communities and rooms, etc. It's also meant to sit in front of the Matrix Synapse Client API, inspecting and allowing/denying requests, in accordance with the configuration policy (preventing people from leaving certain rooms/communities, preventing them from messing around with their profile details, etc.)
Note that Slavi also maintains matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, which can deploy these projects along with Synapse itself.
Bots
twimbot
I was extremely young when I first read and understood Larry Wall's explanation about the virtue of laziness, but I did not expect it to lead here. Cadair has created (I think inspired by an idea from TravisR), a "twimbot". This bot works in conjunction with opsdroid and the opsdroid connector-matrix - it works by storing selected messages from #twim:matrix.org in room state. In this way, it either assists the author by making it easier to produce the blog post you're reading, or it coldly replaces the author, leading to his sacking and penury. To view updates currently held by the bot, join #twim_updates:cadair.com.
Hashtag bot
When he's not working away on the Matrix Spec, TravisR continues to work on less [essential|sane] Matrix projects. This week we have @hashtag:t2bot.io, a bot that converts #hashtags to Matrix groups.
matrix-appservice-bridge and matrix-appservice-irc
Half-Shot will only be working full time with the Matrix Core team for another week (!!!), but until then he's going full-speed with bridge work. First matrix-appservice-irc:
Just pushed out matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0-rc3 which contains a lot of nice things. The full changelog is there, hoping to get some of this tested and running on the matrix.org servers soon, but initial testing looks good :)
Having worked so much on IRC bridging the last few months, Half-Shot has this week managed to make improvements to matrix-appservice-bridge:
Released matrix-appservice-bridge 1.6.0 which contains mostly things I was writing for the irc bridge and factored out instead. There's a couple of goodies like automatic caching of profiles/events, and getEvent as a way to fetch events from the homeserver without fiddling with context.
Some Intent operations now cache requests that would otherwise fall through
to the homeserver which can be expensive. This is configurable for Intents
via the opts.caching.ttl and size options.
AgeCounters now allow you to set your own time period buckets.
Added a new function Intent.getEvent which will fetch events
from the homeserver without any context information, which should
be quick.
MembershipCache is now exposed to let folks read and write to the cache
while also letting the bridge access it.
a release: Fix issue where roomState would fail.
b release: Fix issue where we were calling this.intent inside intent like fools!
c release: Fix issue where some stole js-sdk code was not checked thoroughly.
It uses the go-whatsapp library to talk with the WhatsApp Web API. Using the web API means that you'll still need WhatsApp on your phone connected to the internet, but it also means you won't get banned for using the bridge. The bridge is still very alpha, but basic message bridging and some advanced features already work. There's a features & roadmap document about that.
mxtoot is a Matrix-Mastodon bot from ma1uta, creator of Jeon and the ecosystem around it.
There were two releases last week:
0.4.6 with additional commands (follow, unfollow, mute, unmute, block, unblock users, show followers and followings of the specified user) and a little bugfix.
0.4.7 is out now, which increases the length of messages to 4000 characters.
GSOC is finished!
GSOC 2018 has been valuable for everyone involved!
Thank you zil0 for all your work on the Matrix Python SDK, E2E and and spec work.
Thank you APWhiteHat: lots of work on dendrite, including a bunch of stuff on federation, as well as typing notifications!
and thank you to Cadair for helping to organising it!
The Construct using asynchronous disk IO
Jason writes:
the Construct has advanced to fully asynchronous disk IO in a single-threaded environment. RocksDB is a highly configurable and customizable database with a very large callback surface to support many different environments, which is good to connect it with something like AIO. Normally RocksDB gets its performance from concurrent standard POSIX system calls (blocking IO) with multiple threads. The callback surface and its internals are not specifically suited for deviating from the pthread model. However I hacked RocksDB and tricked it into believing that my userspace contexts, which mimic the std::thread/pthread interface, are threads. This is an example of a RocksDB callback to read from a file, it expects this callback to return immediately (i.e as soon as the kernel returns from a blocking read(2).) Except, where I call fs::read() that is actually a stack-suspension which makes a request to linux AIO where the stack resumes after AIO has called back with the data (see: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis/blob/master/ircd/aio.cc) No modifications to the internals of RocksDB were necessary. The Construct is being developed here: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis.
Community Guides Index
Some weeks ago I asked for suggestions for content to add to a "Community Guides Index". There was not a wave of feedback, but we have enough collected content to be able to share a first pass of this Index. Check out the content there, and please please contact me if you have articles, videos or anything else you'd like to see included. Of course, if you'd like to produce some content and have it included, that would be great too! Ideas for missing articles:
any content in a language other than English
DevOps, how to use k8s or ansible to install Synapse
how to use the Application Services API to make a bot
OggCamp 2018
OggCamp last weekend was great - massive thank you to Jon for organising and running the show - we love your work!
Presentations from Ben and Half-Shot seemed to go down well, we all chatted with Open Source fans and generally flew the flag for Matrix.
New Rooms
tulir has enough projects that he has created #:maunium.net, for any project of his that doesn't have it's own room
This release brings together a lot of bugfixes, and also some preparation for support for Lazy Loading and Room Versioning.
We also have, as a great contribution from @vojeroen, SNI extension support! With v0.33.3, Synapse now supports sending SNI over federation for vhosted servers, which resolves this long-standing request.
Fix missing yield in synapse.storage.monthly_active_users.initialise_reserved_users (#3692)
Improve HTTP request logging to include all requests (#3700, #3723)
Avoid timing out requests while we are streaming back the response (#3701)
Support more federation endpoints on workers (#3705, #3713)
Fix "Starting db txn 'get_all_updated_receipts' from sentinel context" warning (#3710)
Fix bug where state_cache cache factor ignored environment variables (#3719)
Deprecations and Removals
The Shared-Secret registration method of the legacy v1/register REST endpoint has been removed. For a replacement, please see the admin/register API documentation. (#3703)
Internal Changes
The test suite now can run under PostgreSQL. (#3423)
Refactor HTTP replication endpoints to reduce code duplication (#3632)
