'age' field should be in unsigned

[anoadragon453]

The age field of events sent to application services is a constantly changing parameter, and thus should be listed under the unsigned field.

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/application_service/unstable.html#put-transactions-txnid

{
      "age": 32,
      "content": {
        "body": "incoming message",
        "msgtype": "m.text"
      },
      "event_id": "$14328055551tzaee:localhost",
      "origin_server_ts": 1432804485886,
      "room_id": "!TmaZBKYIFrIPVGoUYp:localhost",
      "type": "m.room.message",
      "user_id": "@bob:localhost"
    },

should be:

{
      "content": {
        "body": "incoming message",
        "msgtype": "m.text"
      },
      "event_id": "$14328055551tzaee:localhost",
      "origin_server_ts": 1432804485886,
      "room_id": "!TmaZBKYIFrIPVGoUYp:localhost",
      "type": "m.room.message",
      "unsigned": {
        "age": 32,
      },
      "user_id": "@bob:localhost"
    },

[turt2live]

for documentation purposes: age currently resides under unsigned for the client/server API.

There seems to be a bunch of issues related to appservices being special in event formats :(

[richvdh]

Honestly I'd rather see age going away altogether. Does anything actually rely on it rather than just using origin_server_ts?

There seems to be a bunch of issues related to appservices being special in event formats :(

Yup a bunch of things got fixed for the C-S API around the time /sync got introduced, but the AS API missed the memos.

[Half-Shot]

It's probably fair to deprecate it in the next C-S release, rather than just removing it. For one thing, bridges (like the discord bridge, and I believe the IRC bridge) use it to drop old events that synapse streams to use.

So that's the only use case I can think of in AS land. If someone wants to write a feature for sy/dendrite to NOT send us super old transactions then I won't be needing it.

For Riot it's used for making sure calls don't race and things like that, according to a convo I had with Erik.

[anoadragon453]

fwiw I'm tracking that bug here: matrix-org/dendrite#497 But it probably lies better on this repo.

[anoadragon453]

Also age is apparently used for clients whose clocks might be way off, according to Dave.

[Half-Shot]

Is this done, looks like it was done in #1552?

[turt2live]

#1552 fixes some aspects of the events, although a side effect of #1552 means that the age field still hasn't moved. I've altered #1558 to better describe the age field, and include it in such a way where it would show up in the appservice spec.

[uhoreg]

Fixed by #1558