format of matrix:// URI is nonconforming

[NeilHanlon]

Description

It was pointed out that the matrix://homeserver/username format is not valid per current Matrix spec; the correct form is matrix:u/userid:homeserver

Impact

Unclear what actual impact there is, but it'd be good to align in spec just in case.

Proposed Solution

Update noggin to present the new format, deprecate the old format, update dependencies to ensure they're extracting data correctly (e.g.: https://github.com/fedora-infra/maubot-fedora/blob/main/fedora/utils.py#L69-L79)

[TheArcaneBrony]

The correct format is matrix:u/userid:homeserver, as per the specification

[NeilHanlon]

Oops, botched that one. Thanks for the correction

[GregSutcliffe]

So, chatting with @abompard, this will be somewhat tricky...

The actual change is easy enough - we have a form validator that checks the data and then stores it, which we can change.

However, two things then surface:

1. Noggin doesn't have a DB, the data is in LDAP/IPA - so we'd need to go change all existing entries in LDAP with some script (otherwise we'll have inconsistent formats in there)
2. Noggin/IPA is the source for FASJSON, and we don't necessarily know all the consumers of that, so we'll probably have to announce the change and wait a bit

@abompard did I miss anything?

[NeilHanlon]

this will be somewhat tricky...

As I was staring at the code trying to see what it was doing, and forgetting that Noggin was simply a front end that validated the data... I figured it wasn't going to be "simple". :D

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 60 days with no activity.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed because it has been inactive for 7 days since being marked as stale.

[NeilHanlon]

Not stale :)

[james-antill]

A couple of thoughts:

1. The code linked to is: nick, sep_, server = value.partition(":") ... which looks like what the issue wants it to be, but that code is from 4 years ago? So I'm confused.

2. I'm not sure how bad it would really be to just have two formats in IPA ... we should announce that we'll be accepting the new (correct) format, but all the consumers already have code to deal with the old format (or just pass it through) so I'm much less sure we need to migrate the data in IPA. The only real downside is that this means if something is unmaintained and only deals with the old format, it won't just blow up for everyone on day 1 ... but that's also kind of an upside.

[abompard]

The reason it was stored like this in IPA in the first place, is to make it easy for consumers of FASJSON to parse both IRC and Matrix fields using their favorite URL parsing library, and get somewhat similar fields: the server in the "hostname" attribute, etc. With the official Matrix format, they'd get u as the hostname.
That said, maybe it's naive to think we can have a common representation of different communication protocols as they may be very different architecture-wise. And there's always a plus side to adhering to a standard.
We could read it and display it in the official format in Noggin, and store it in the "common" format in IPA, but that would mean users of FASJSON would get a different format than what's shown in Noggin.
I'm not really sure what's best.