Synapse 1.38.0rc1 (2021-07-06)

This release includes a database schema update which could result in elevated disk usage. See the upgrade notes for more information.

Features

Implement refresh tokens as specified by MSC2918. (#9450)
Add support for evicting cache entries based on last access time. (#10205)
Omit empty fields from the /sync response. Contributed by @deepbluev7. (#10214)
Improve validation on federation send_{join,leave,knock} endpoints. (#10225, #10243)
Add SSO external_ids to the Query User Account admin API. (#10261)
Mark events received over federation which fail a spam check as "soft-failed". (#10263)
Add metrics for new inbound federation staging area. (#10284)
Add script to print information about recently registered users. (#10290)

Fix a long-standing bug which meant that invite rejections and knocks were not sent out over federation in a timely manner. (#10223)
Fix a bug introduced in v1.26.0 where only users who have set profile information could be deactivated with erasure enabled. (#10252)
Fix a long-standing bug where Synapse would return errors after 2³¹ events were handled by the server. (#10264, #10267, #10282, #10286, #10291, #10314, #10326)
Fix the prometheus synapse_federation_server_pdu_process_time metric. Broke in v1.37.1. (#10279)
Ensure that inbound events from federation that were being processed when Synapse was restarted get promptly processed on start up. (#10303)

Move the upgrade notes to docs/upgrade.md and convert them to markdown. (#10166)
Choose Welcome & Overview as the default page for synapse documentation website. (#10242)
Adjust the URL in the README.rst file to point to irc.libera.chat. (#10258)
Fix homeserver config option name in presence router documentation. (#10288)
Fix link pointing at the wrong section in the modules documentation page. (#10302)

Drop Origin and Accept from the value of the Access-Control-Allow-Headers response header. (#10114)
Add type hints to the federation servlets. (#10213)
Improve the reliability of auto-joining remote rooms. (#10237)
Update the release script to use the semver terminology and determine the release branch based on the next version. (#10239)
Fix type hints for computing auth events. (#10253)
Improve the performance of the spaces summary endpoint by only recursing into spaces (and not rooms in general). (#10256)
Move event authentication methods from Auth to EventAuthHandler. (#10268)
Re-enable a SyTest after it has been fixed. (#10292)