Updating thunderbird from 68 to 78 in focal

[Olivier Tilloy]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 3:15 PM Marc Deslauriers
<marc.deslauriers at canonical.com> wrote:
> Subject: Re: Updating thunderbird from 68 to 78 in focal
> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 09:13:38 -0500
> From: Marc Deslauriers <marc.deslauriers at canonical.com>
> To: technical-board at lists.ubuntu.com
>
> On 2021-01-15 4:13 p.m., Olivier Tilloy wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am working on updating thunderbird in focal from version 68 to
> > version 78 (78.5.0 is currently in focal-proposed), because upstream
> > has ended support for the 68 series (bionic will follow).
> > This is a new major version that brings a number of changes, and
> > breaks a couple of packages in the archive (jsunit and tinyjsd, see
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1895643/comments/29
> > for details). I have consequently marked thunderbird as breaking these
> > packages to ensure they are uninstalled on upgrade, and I have started
> > a conversation with the SRU team (Robie specifically, who suggested
> > this is TB territory) to try and come up with an optimal solution. Are
> > there precedents of similar situations?
> > Should tinyjsd and jsunit be removed from the focal archive? Should we
> > prepare SRUs making them empty (Robie mentioned this was done with
> > bitcoin and similar)?
> > How do we mitigate and document the breakage?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> >  Olivier
> >
>
> Since the packages contain software that is meant to run specifically in firefox
> and thunderbird, and the only reverse-depends seems to be enigmail which is now
> obsolete, I think it is appropriate to simply SRU empty packages. I assume this
> will be done with enigmail too since it is no longer compatible or required with
> the newer thunderbird?

As I mentioned in another reply on this thread, enigmail has been
updated with a version compatible with thunderbird 78 that serves to
migrate existing enigmail settings and key into thunderbird's built-in
functionality.
That version is available in focal-proposed (2:2.2.4-0ubuntu0.20.04.1)
and it goes together with the thunderbird update.


> While I can't recall the exact details, I'm pretty sure we did something similar
> to firefox plugins when we switched to shipping new upstream versions instead of
> backporting patches.
>
> As for documenting the breakage...adding a note to the NEWS file in the empty
> packages should be sufficient. Do you expect this to actually break something?
>
> If any other member of the tech board disagrees with this, we can add it as a
> topic for our next meeting.