rooms without canonical aliases published in a group directory are unjoinable

[ara4n]

as riot apparently ignores non-canonical aliases. we should surely fall back to non-canonical aliases if the canonical alias is missing

[ara4n]

So there are at least 5 problems here:

• We do not default the canonical alias of a room to the first alias that is set.
• Somehow Gnosis were able to publish rooms in their directory without setting an alias at all, which means they can't be joined over federation.
• Apparently you can publish rooms in a group without canonical aliases, which means they can't be joined over federation
• The groups API only ever returns a canonical alias for a room in your /groups/+group:example.com/rooms response, so if one isn't set, you can't join it over federation, even if it has aliases.
• The JS SDK puts the result of the /groups/rooms API into a GroupRoomType object (but doesn't check the type), and then coerces that into a RoomShape object (without checking the type). The former doesn't have an aliases field; the latter does, but it's too late by that point.

It would be sufficient to fix the first 3 here, i think.

[turt2live]

iirc the conclusion on the remainder of this is to fix the groups stuff relying on the canonical alias so much. This probably requires a change to the API to return any alias it can find, but also potentially minor changes in Riot to have it understand this.

[turt2live]

It looks like matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#2173 is the place that fixes a bunch of this. @ara4n what's the status on this?

[t3chguy]

This is fixed by Spaces landing in Beta in next Release