Room Summaries (was: Calculate room names server-side)

[matrixbot]

Documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11i14UI1cUz-OJ0knD5BFu7fmT6Fo327zvMYqfSAR7xs/edit#
Author: @ara4n
Date: 2018-06-10

The rules for calculating the display name of a room are complicated. It would be preferable to offload some of this work to the server.

This becomes even more important with the advent of lazy-loaded members (#1227), as a given client will typically not have enough info to correctly name the room otherwise.

This would probably mean adding a field to the /sync response.

Care would need to be taken to make sure that the textual parts of the name can be translated into the user's preferred language. This would probably mean providing the information in a structured manner (possibly as well as supplying preformatted strings in one or more languages for clients to use for simplicity if they prefer).

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-425)

(Reported by @richvdh)

[matrixbot]

Jira watchers: @richvdh

[matrixbot]

Links exported from Jira:

relates to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/573
relates to SYN-265

[ara4n]

This comes up as a blocker for lazyloading members (#1227), where otherwise we don't have enough data to calculate the name locally. Going to write a proposal for how to fix this (which I vaguely remember sketching out already somewhere, but i don't think has ever been actually written down).