45cc80b538
A device's room list holds two unrelated kinds of room and nothing on a row said
which. A NIP-17 room is a conversation between the people in it. A Marmot room is
a *group* -- an id its key derives, a membership baked into an MLS tree, admins
who can act for it, a signature anyone holding the id can check -- and the two
behave differently enough that guessing is a mistake.
`"Ekklesia (#admins)"` was an attempt at saying so, and it marked the wrong half.
Only the admin room got it; a subgroup got no marker at all, so as soon as a group
had one child, half the Marmot rooms on the device were unmarked. It also sorted
nowhere near the group it belonged to, and a truncated row drops a trailing suffix
first -- so the marker was missing exactly where the list is crowded enough to
need it.
**The rule is `MarmotGroupName.of`, and it runs where a room is minted rather than
where it is drawn.** The name is baked into the epoch-0 `MarmotGroupData` every
member is welcomed with, so a `#` added at display time would be a name this
device alone could see. `#Ekklesia` marks both kinds of group room, and marks them
at the front.
**Three mints, because there are three ways a Marmot room comes into existence.**
`MarmotGroupCreation.create` is the funnel for two of them -- the admin room a
group opens after its ceremony, and a subgroup -- and normalising there means
neither caller has to remember. The third, `SelectChatRoomTypeViewModel`'s
convenient room, has a random id rather than a derived one, so it has no key state
to adopt and no admin set to bake in and does not pass through that funnel; it
applies the rule itself.
**Idempotence is load-bearing, not tidiness.** A subgroup's name is derived twice
from the same bare ceremony-room subject, by two callers that never see each
other: `SubgroupManager.proposeBirthCertificate` normalises the name the parent's
quorum is asked to sign, and `MarmotGroupCreation` normalises the name the room
carries. Those two have to be the same string, or the subgroup is not called what
its parent certified -- and a certificate is a signature over the name, so a
verifier comparing them would see a real mismatch. `of` being idempotent is what
makes them agree by construction rather than by both sites being kept in step.
**The ceremony room keeps the bare name.** It is a NIP-17 room -- where a subgroup
is made, not the subgroup -- and prefixing it too produced two identically-named
rows, which spends the mark to say nothing. `Translators` (the ceremony) now sits
beside `#Translators` (the group it stood up), which is the distinction the `#`
exists to draw. Its subject is trimmed, so the bare name and the two normalised
ones cannot differ by whitespace.
**The `#` is drawn beside the name field, not pushed into its state.** `name` in
`SelectSubgroupAdminsViewModel` stays bare and the M3 `prefix` slot shows the
convention, because normalising on every keystroke moves the caret out from under
somebody halfway through a word. The coordinator still reads the name they are
about to get.
Four strings lose the old name -- "Create the #admins group" becomes "Create the
admin room", and the three about what "the #admins room" will sign with now say
"the admin room". Their keys are renamed with them, since the keys in this
catalogue are derived from the text. Around twenty comments, two screen previews
and seven test fixtures follow.
Docs: the ceremony note states the convention and what it replaces, and the
subgroups note's name-field section is rewritten -- it had been arguing from the
`"${parent.subject} (#admins)"` synthesis that no longer exists.
`docs/mls-skipped-keys.md` keeps its `"Frosty (#admins)"`: that is a captured
debugging log, and rewriting it would falsify a record.
Three tests. `MarmotGroupNameTest` pins the rule, idempotence included.
`MarmotGroupCreationJvmTest` pins the funnel -- a bare name in, `#Ekklesia` on both
the room row this device draws and the group data every other member reads.
`SubgroupManagerJvmTest` pins the pair that has to agree, by reading the proposed
event's tags back out of the signing session: the name the parent is asked to sign
is the name `MarmotGroupCreation` will give the room. That last one needed the
signable-parent fixture to seed host keys, since a ceremony's signer ids are
derived from them rather than stored.
**Rooms that already exist keep their names.** The name lives in the epoch-0 group
context, so renaming one is an MLS commit every member has to process -- a
different change from a naming convention, and not made here.
403 common tests, 726 jvm tests, `m3Audit` meets every budget with 0 title-case
strings and 0 dp literals.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
9.1 KiB
Adding members to a Marmot group
How members join an MLS group in this app, why the current shape has a silent failure mode, and what to do about it.
This is the part of Marmot most likely to waste a day: everything compiles, the invite reports success, and a member simply never appears. The reason is never in the invite code.
The two paths through inviteMember
MarmotOutboundDao.inviteMember branches on isOneMemberInitialGroupCreation:
true — the group is only its creator.
The Welcome goes out immediately via deliveryWelcome, which builds it and
inserts a GiftWrapPayload. No commit event is broadcast and no
MarmotCommitResult is stored. Correct, because there is nobody else in the group
who needs to learn anything.
false — the group already has members.
A commit event (kind 445, ephemeral signer, h-tagged with nostrGroupId) is
broadcast so existing members advance their epoch. The Welcome is not sent.
Instead commitResult.welcomeBytes is stored on a MarmotCommitResult, and
DatabaseNostrRepository picks it back up when the relay acknowledges the commit
and only then calls deliveryWelcome.
The deferral is deliberate: the invitee must not join an epoch the existing members have not reached yet.
Which branch is taken, and why nobody chooses it
inviteMember derives it:
val isOneMemberInitialGroupCreation = mlsGroup.members().size == 1
Read before addMember advances the tree, and members() skips empty leaves so it
stays right for a group that has had members removed.
No caller passes it, deliberately. None of them is in a better position to know,
and both that tried got it wrong: inviteMemberToChatRoom hardcoded false, so
every group's first invite took the deferred path even though the group was
still just its creator. That was wrong twice over — the commit had no audience,
and the Welcome was then gated on a relay acknowledging it. With
Relays.DefaultDMRelayList down to a single relay, that meant the first invitee
of every group depended on one ack for an event nobody needed.
Why this fails silently
MarmotInboundManager refuses anything from a future epoch outright, on both
wire formats:
PrivateMessage epoch N is ahead of local epoch M; ignoring
Commit epoch N is ahead of local epoch M; ignoring
There is no queue and no replay for either. A commit that arrives before its
recipient's Welcome is dropped, not deferred, and that member never advances.
EPOCH_RETENTION_WINDOW (5) retains past epochs so late messages can still be
decrypted; it does nothing for messages from ahead.
Under the old hardcoded false, inviting two admins back to back went:
- invite admin 1 → commit 1 broadcast immediately, Welcome 1 waits for ack 1
- invite admin 2 → commit 2 broadcast immediately, Welcome 2 waits for ack 2
Both commits were on the wire before either Welcome. If commit 2 reached admin 1 before Welcome 1 did — different transports, no ordering guarantee, one a gift wrap and the other a kind:445 — admin 1 dropped it and was stuck an epoch behind, while the coordinator saw two successful invites.
Deriving the flag narrowed this, but did not close it: for n ≥ 3 the window between Welcome 1 and commit 2 remained.
Batching closes it. When the membership is known up front, every member goes into one commit, so no member ever has to process a commit for an epoch they were not yet in — the race has nothing left to lose. See below.
The condition holds at any group size
"The group has nobody to inform" is true exactly once, on the first invite, whether the group ends up with 2 members or 30:
| invite | members().size |
branch | correct because |
|---|---|---|---|
| admin 1 | 1 | immediate Welcome, no commit | nobody to inform |
| admin 2 | 2 | commit + deferred Welcome | admin 1 must advance |
| admin 3 | 3 | commit + deferred Welcome | admins 1–2 must advance |
Commit 2 is encrypted with commitResult.preCommitExporterSecret — the epoch-1
secret, which admin 1 received in their Welcome — so they can decrypt it and
advance.
Batching every add into one commit
MarmotOutboundDao.addMembersToChatRoom stages every member with proposeAdd and
issues a single commit(). MlsGroup.addMember is just those two in one call, and
pendingProposals is a list, so nothing in MLS objected.
One commit produces one Welcome: buildWelcome emits an EncryptedGroupSecrets
per added member, and each joiner finds its own entry by key package reference. The
blob is shared; delivery is still per peer, because each Welcome event is tagged
with that peer's key package.
Both callers that know their membership up front now use it —
SelectChatRoomTypeViewModel.inviteMembers at room creation, and
DkgRitualViewModel.inviteAdmins for the admin room.
Why this needed no schema change
Batching at creation time means the single commit happens while the group is still
only its creator. That takes the immediate-Welcome branch: no commit is broadcast,
and MarmotCommitResult is never written. The bookkeeping that assumes one peer per
commit is simply not on the path.
So addMembersToChatRoom batches only when members().size == 1, and falls
back to inviting sequentially otherwise. Batching into a group that already has
members would take the deferred branch, where MarmotCommitResult.peerKeyPackageEventId
is singular and DatabaseNostrRepository's ack-triggered delivery expects one
Welcome. Making that work means holding a list of peers there and fanning out on
acknowledgement — still outstanding, and only needed for adding several members to
an established group, which nothing currently does.
Ordering within the batch
The group state is persisted after commit() and before any Welcome is delivered,
so a crash between the two leaves the group at the epoch the Welcomes describe
rather than one behind it.
What the room is told
An invite writes three kinds of line into the room's transcript, none of which
travels — see ChatMessage.MEMBERSHIP_TYPES. They exist because the deferral
above is invisible from anywhere else: the screen that asks for an invite closes
the moment the commit is made, and everything that can still go wrong goes wrong
after that.
| line | written by | says |
|---|---|---|
TYPE_MEMBER_INVITED |
inviteMember, addMembersToChatRoom |
the membership change was made |
TYPE_MEMBER_INVITE_SENT |
DatabaseNostrRepository |
the deferred Welcome went on the wire |
TYPE_MEMBER_INVITE_FAILED |
deliveryWelcome, DatabaseChatRepository |
it did not, and why |
The invite line is written when the invite is made, inside the caller's
transaction. Both halves of that matter: written any later and an invite waiting
on an ack that never comes leaves the room showing nothing, which is what this
looked like before; written outside the transaction and an invite that does not
survive addMember leaves the room claiming one was made.
Only the immediate branch's Welcome goes out in the same breath as the invite, so
only the deferred branch owes a second line. Where the two are one event, one line
is the whole truth — and createdAt is stored to the second, so a second line
would be one the transcript could not reliably order after the first anyway.
A refusal is the awkward case, because rolling the transaction back is right and
takes the account of it with it. DatabaseChatRepository.inviteMember catches,
writes the failed line from outside the transaction, and rethrows — the throw is
what puts a message on the invite screen now, the line is what is still there
tomorrow.
Other things that bite
Sequential invites each advance the epoch. Where they still happen — the
fallback in addMembersToChatRoom for a group that already has members, and any
direct inviteMember call — the room must be re-read from the database between
them. A snapshot taken before the previous invite builds its commit on state the
group has already left, and the symptom is a conflicting commit rather than an
error.
A member with no published key package cannot be added. A Marmot invite needs
the invitee's MarmotKeyPackage. Both call sites look it up with a timeout and
collect the ones that failed. That is still only a log and a returned list —
nothing puts it in the room, because it happens before there is an invite to write
a line about. The TODO: Update status of participant Invitation.PENDING -> Invitation.SENT at the Welcome delivery site is the same gap seen from the other
end: the transcript lines above say what happened, but a Participant row still
carries no state saying where its invite got to.
deliveryWelcome uses Relays.DefaultDMRelayList, not the room's relays.
There is a TODO: Get localChatRoom relays... on the ack-triggered call site.