Synapse 1.66.0rc1 (2022-08-23)

This release removes the ability for homeservers to delegate email ownership
verification and password reset confirmation to identity servers. This removal
was originally planned for Synapse 1.64, but was later deferred until now.

See the upgrade notes for more details.

Features

• Improve validation of request bodies for the following client-server API endpoints: /account/password, /account/password/email/requestToken, /account/deactivate and /account/3pid/email/requestToken. (#13188, #13563)
• Add forgotten status to Room Details Admin API. (#13503)
• Add an experimental implementation for MSC3852 (Expose user agents on Device). (#13549)
• Add org.matrix.msc2716v4 experimental room version with updated content fields. Part of MSC2716 (Importing history). (#13551)
• Add support for compression to federation responses. (#13537)
• Improve performance of sending messages in rooms with thousands of local users. (#13522, #13547)

Bugfixes

• Faster room joins: make /joined_members block whilst the room is partial stated. (#13514)
• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.21.0 where the /event_reports Admin API could return a total count which was larger than the number of results you can actually query for. (#13525)
• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.52.0 where sending server notices fails if max_avatar_size or allowed_avatar_mimetypes is set and not system_mxid_avatar_url. (#13566)
• Fix a bug where the opentracing.force_tracing_for_users config option would not apply to /sendToDevice and /keys/upload requests. (#13574)

Improved Documentation

• Add openssl example for generating registration HMAC digest. (#13472)
• Tidy up Synapse's README. (#13491)
• Document that event purging related to the redaction_retention_period config option is executed only every 5 minutes. (#13492)
• Add a warning to retention documentation regarding the possibility of database corruption. (#13497)
• Document that the DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 flag is needed to build the docker image. (#13515)
• Add missing links in user_consent section of configuration manual. (#13536)
• Fix the doc and some warnings that were referring to the nonexistent custom_templates_directory setting (instead of custom_template_directory). (#13538)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove the ability for homeservers to delegate email ownership verification
  and password reset confirmation to identity servers. See upgrade notes for more details.

Internal Changes

Faster room joins

• Update the rejected state of events during de-partial-stating. (#13459)
• Avoid blocking lazy-loading /syncs during partial joins due to remote memberships. Pull remote memberships from auth events instead of the room state. (#13477)
• Refuse to start when faster joins is enabled on a deployment with workers, since worker configurations are not currently supported. (#13531)

Metrics and tracing

• Allow use of both @trace and @tag_args stacked on the same function. (#13453)
• Instrument the federation/backfill part of /messages for understandable traces in Jaeger. (#13489)
• Instrument FederationStateIdsServlet (/state_ids) for understandable traces in Jaeger. (#13499, #13554)
• Track HTTP response times over 10 seconds from /messages (synapse_room_message_list_rest_servlet_response_time_seconds). (#13533)
• Add metrics to track how the rate limiter is affecting requests (sleep/reject). (#13534, #13541)
• Add metrics to time how long it takes us to do backfill processing (synapse_federation_backfill_processing_before_time_seconds, synapse_federation_backfill_processing_after_time_seconds). (#13535, #13584)
• Add metrics to track rate limiter queue timing (synapse_rate_limit_queue_wait_time_seconds). (#13544)
• Update metrics to track /messages response time by room size. (#13545)

Everything else

• Refactor methods in synapse.api.auth.Auth to use Requester objects everywhere instead of user IDs. (#13024)
• Clean-up tests for notifications. (#13471)
• Add some miscellaneous comments to document sync, especially around compute_state_delta. (#13474)
• Use literals in place of HTTPStatus constants in tests. (#13479, #13488)
• Add comments about how event push actions are rotated. (#13485)
• Modify HTML template content to better support mobile devices' screen sizes. (#13493)
• Add a linter script which will reject non-strict types in Pydantic models. (#13502)
• Reduce the number of tests using legacy TCP replication. (#13543)
• Allow specifying additional request fields when using the HomeServerTestCase.login helper method. (#13549)
• Make HomeServerTestCase load any configured homeserver modules automatically. (#13558)