Matrix Live Smörgåsbord 🎙

Featuring: Open Tracing, Synapse, Dendrite and Riot Web

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec News

jaywink:

<community-hat>

I'm working on a specification for exporting metadata and usage metrics out of federated servers. The aim is that the same specification could be re-used cross-protocol for example with not only Matrix servers but also ActivityPub, Diaspora and XMPP servers, as an example. Looking for comments here: https://talk.feneas.org/t/serverinfo-specification-for-server-metadata/99

</community-hat>

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

anoa:

Synapse

Neil, who oversees the Synapse factory:

This week we’ve been working on improving database performance, shipping the new small hosted homeserver instances - expect a lot of improvements to come that will benefit the whole community and merged our recent OpenTracing support. We’ve also made some changes to how Sydent processes and stores email - more details here https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/19/privacy-changes-to-new-vector-identity-servers Next week, expect a new release, more database performance improvements and general Synapse performance work.

Listen to Matrix Live to hear Erik talking about his DB perf work ☝️

Ruma

This Week in Ruma, from Jimmy:

...

While I was working on ruma-signatures, I decided to fill in the missing functionality—signing and verifying events. In the process of doing that, I ended up with a significantly revised API for the crate, which has now been released as version 0.5.0.

...

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

New release of matrix-nio (Python SDK)

poljar said:

New matrix-nio release bringing you documentation improvements across the board, while the documentation is still not fully complete yet it should be much easier to get started with nio.

Another highlight of this release is couroutine support for the event callbacks for the AsyncClient.

Take a look at the getting started guide too.

Ruby SDK

Ananace:

I just cut a 1.3.0 release of the Ruby SDK, mainly focusing on solving an issue due to Ruby extensions polluting the global scope. It also adds a very slightly extended response handling, which recursively adds getters for the keys of the resulting objects.

Many thanks to the people reporting issues to me so I can keep improving the SDK.

The Kotlin library koma

yuforia, author of koma and Continuum:

Fixed incorrect type casting in function KResult.map

Reorganize the structure of modules, separate APIs that don't require authentication, so that they can be used before signing in

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot announced:

Today we've released 0.3.0 of the slack bridge since the last rc has proved to be stable. I hope you all enjoy the new features we've packed into this release. And as a reminder, there is another release right around the corner :)

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX (Android)

From the team (see Matrix Live from last week for more from them):

RiotX 0.2.0 has been released on Thursday. Main new features: room filtering, mesage editing in e2e rooms, view editing history. Also many small new features and bugfixes. Full perimeter can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/milestone/6?closed=1 Known limitation: crash on device running Android KitKat (4.4). We are considering supporting only device running Android Lollipop (5.0) and up (see/approve/comment https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/issues/405)

The team is still working on the main missing features: creation of direct chat, read receipt, along with UI/UX polishing.

If you're using Android, definitely start trying RiotX, you can even find it in the Play Store now.

Riot Web

From the team:

Riot v1.3.0 was released with support for reactions and message editing enabled. Check out the Riot blog post for more details. No changes are needed to enable these features for self-hosted installs anymore (which is change from what was stated in last week’s TWIM update). We’re continuing to work on several privacy improvements to related to integration managers and identity servers to give users more control over these.

Riot Android

From the team:

Riot 0.9.2 has been released on Friday. It contains some bug fixes and new translations for many strings especially for the device verification feature.

Riot iOS

From the team:

We released v0.9.1 with message editing, reactions and file upload.

We are continuing to work on reactions (emoji picker).

We have started to implement soft logout.

FluffyChat

krille:

In the newest update FluffyChat now supports avatars in Push Notifications. Also translations have been updated and some minor design tweaks have been made.

I know that E2EE for FluffyChat is continuing to be worked on, just not quite ready yet.

Continuum, client based on koma

yuforia, author of koma and Continuum:

Update GUI library openjfx from version 11 to 12

Rewrite build script in Kotlin, replacing Groovy

Fractal, GNOME client

Alexandre Franke on Fractal:

Several bugs were fixed in the past three weeks. We are also sending typing notifications now. With 4.1.1 out, we’re at the second beta on the way to 4.2.

Also:

some people might be interested in a tweak in our build config that makes it so that crashes are aborts now (i.e. you get a trace and they are not silent anymore)

Spectral

Black Hat is changing Spectral's buildsystem from QMake to CMake.

Dept of Ops 🛠

sendtomatrix script

Madic has created a shell script to send messages to a room:

I've written a linux shell script with which you can send (multiline) messages to a matrix room. It only needs a username / password or access token, server fqdn and roomid as argument or provided by a configuration file. Arguments can overwrite settings from the file, for e.g. using same credentials but different channel. If no access token is provided, a new one will be requested and used to send the message. You can use the script for e.g. cronjobs, nagios notifications or ci pipelines. An example for a cronjob and a nagios notification script is also provided.

I have ended up with an similar file of my own containing a bunch of commented-out curl lines, but this is a lot cleaner!

You may also recall a similar project: matrix-shell-suite (#matrix-shell-suite:matrix.org.)

Dept of Bots 🤖

Maths bot(s)

Tim created a bot for rendering Maths:

I was told that people here might be interested: I just wrote a small bot that can reply with PNG renderings of maths (https://github.com/thosgood/matrix-maths-bot)

and then, tulir blatantly ripped him off was inspired to create a maubot providing the LaTeX to SVG rendering: https://github.com/maubot/tex

Dept of Services 🚀

New room for t2bot.io

TravisR, who arranges and hosts the various bots and bridges on t2bot.io:

#news:t2bot.io is now a room for people who want to follow along with news about t2bot.io which might be missed in #help:t2bot.io. Stuff like when bridges are updated and new services will be announced in there. #status:t2bot.io is where service stability is addressed during major problems with the service.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!