Ship the email templates as package_data

move the example email templates into the synapse package so that they can be
used as package data, which should mean that all of the packaging mechanisms
(pip, docker, debian, arch, etc) should now come with the example templates.

In order to grandfather in people who relied on the templates being in the old
place, check for that situation and fall back to using the defaults if the
templates directory does not exist.

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/changelog.d/4052.feature b/changelog.d/4052.feature
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..0c01f06880
--- /dev/null
+++ b/changelog.d/4052.feature
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+Ship the example email templates as part of the package
+
+**Note**: if you deploy your Synapse instance from a git checkout or a github
+snapshot URL, then this means that the example email templates will no longer
+be installed in `res/templates`. If you have email notifications enabled, you
+should ensure that `email.template_dir` is either configured to point at a
+directory where you have installed customised templates, or leave it unset to
+use the default templates.
+
+The configuration parser will try to detect the situation where
+`email.template_dir` is incorrectly set to `res/templates` and do the right
+thing, but will warn about this.
\ No newline at end of file