Downgrade Thunderbird 6 to Thunderbird 5 from PPA

[Dotan Cohen]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 18:03, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> What release of Ubuntu are you on? That deb is from 11.10 which hasn't
> been released yet, so I would avoid it if you're on 11.04 or below.
>

Kubuntu 11.04. The Tbird 5 was from the Mozilla PPA, which no longer
makes it available for download and manual installation.

> Have you contacted the author of the extension to see if they are
> planning to update it?
>

Yes, I am a regular tester and triager of Virtual Identity. The fix is
already released and Thunderbird is now working again. However, I do
need to know how to handle these situations for software that I am not
in contact with the devs.

Alan, what is your opinion of Yum? I see that it is in fact available
for Ubuntu. Yum can be configured to remember software versions and
configurations. When so configured, the user can simply rpm -Uhv
--rollback 'august 16' and be done with it. I cannot find a similar
feature for aptitude.


> I would first disable the PPA, then "apt-get autoremove" thunderbird.

That wants to remove Enigmail and then reinstalling Enigmail will be
an engima. I'm a bit afraid of that route.


> It would probably be easier to then grab the version 5 release from
> Mozilla upstream and run that until the extension you need is updated.

They don't have it available! At least, I cannot find it. Wait,
scratch that, googling Mozilla mirrors at least finds me a few mirros
that still have the tarball.


> I'm not sure if you can suppress the update mechanism easily in 5 to
> prevent going to 6 for now. If you can find a deb for your release of
> Ubuntu then you could use that and "pin" it to prevent it updating.
>

That was my plan. Now that Virtual Identity is fixed the issue is less
critical, but the secondary goal of knowing how to roll back is still
important to me. Mozilla plans on updating Tbird every three months. I
like to keep a reasonably-new Tbird as Thunderbird Conversations
pushes many patches to Mozilla and many features of Conversations
require a very recent Tbird. So I will inadvertently break it  again.
In other words, I need to learn how to handle living near the bleeding
edge.


-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com