Don't return extra member count or e2ee device updates from sync
Previously, we were returning redundant member count updates or encrypted device updates from the /sync endpoint in some cases. The extra member count updates are spec-compliant, but unnecessary, while the extra encrypted device updates violate the spec.
The refactor necessary to fix this bug is also necessary to support filtering on state events in sync.
Details
Joined room incremental sync needs to examine state events for four purposes:
- determining whether we need to return an update to room member counts
- determining the set of left/joined devices for encrypted rooms
(returned in
device_lists
) - returning state events to the client (in
rooms.joined.*.state
) - tracking which member events we have sent to the client, so they can be omitted on future requests when lazy-loading is enabled.
The state events that we need to examine for the first two cases is member
events in the delta between since
and the end of timeline
. For the
second two cases, we need the delta between since
and the start of
timeline
, plus contextual member events for any senders that occur in
timeline
. The second list is subject to filtering, while the first is
not.
Before this change, we were using the same set of state events that we are
returning to the client (cases 3/4) to do the analysis for cases 1/2.
In a compliant implementation, this would result in us missing some
relevant member events in 1/2 in addition to seeing redundant member
events. In current grapevine this is not the case because the set of
events that we return to the client is always a superset of the set that
is needed for cases 1/2. This is because we don't support filtering, and
we have an existing bug1 where we are returning the delta between
since
and the end of timeline
rather than the start.
Fixing this is necessary to implement filtering because otherwise we would start missing some member events for member count or encrypted device updates if the relevant member events are rejected by the filter. This would be much worse than our current behavior.