[Bug 2066347] [NEW] Thunderbird Snap cannot access profile outside home after 24.04 upgrade

[J B]

Public bug reported:

After upgrading yesterday to 24.04, thunderbird would not open. I got
the error "Thunderbird is already running, but not responding". In the
terminal, it looks like this:

$ thunderbird 
Gtk-Message: 10:04:38.068: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libpci missing
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/XULStore.sys.mjs, line 60: Error: Can't find profile directory.
console.error: (new UnknownError("IndexedDB: thunderbird/url-classifier-skip-urls getLastModified() IndexedDB:   The operation failed for reasons unrelated to the database itself and not covered by any other error code.", "resource://services-settings/IDBHelpers.jsm", 18))

The cause of this is that in ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini I list a
profile path that is outside /home in a data directory that sees regular
back ups.

thunderbird is in snap now, and snaps are hardcoded
(https://askubuntu.com/questions/1033344/how-to-give-snaps-access-to-
somedir) to permit no data access beyond /home.

This is the reason it could not start any more.

A possible way forward is to make the data access of snaps configurable.

In the meanwhile, I uninstalled the snap-thunderbird and installed deb-thunderbird following
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2024/03/install-thunderbird-deb-ubuntu-2404/

** Affects: thunderbird (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Title:
  Thunderbird Snap cannot access profile outside home after 24.04
  upgrade

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