Thunderbird beta snap built from source - call for testing and next steps for Noble

Project Discussion Desktop
1

Hey desktoppers,

The Thunderbird snap has been repacking the upstream binaries until now. I’ve spent some time recently to redo the packaging and build from source instead (reusing mostly what the Firefox snap is doing). Building from source will allow us to build on other architectures than amd64 and make the snap more compliant with the Ubuntu standards.

I’ve merged those changes now to the beta branch and a new revision is now available in the corresponding store channel for testing (rev437). If you are using Thunderbird and want to give that build a try we would really welcome the feedback.

You can install it by doing $ snap install --beta Thunderbird (or snap refresh if you are using the stable snap currently). Note that if you are an user of the Thunderbird snap from the stable channel and plan to go back you might want to backup ~/snap/thunderbird first since running beta will upgrade the profile and make it incompatible with older versions of the software.

We are aiming at using the snap built from source instead of the deb in Noble.
(the reasons are the same than for Firefox, making it easier to roll new versions on older supported series and reducing the maintenance efforts).

Thanks in advance to those who will help us testing the new builds!

you can report issues here or on OpenID transaction in progress

12 Likes
2

Sweet, been using the snap version since it was put up on the Snapcraft.io. I just update to the beta one and will test it out. Thanks.

3

That’s a good point, TB snap simply works.
The last annoying point for me is:

Will the new beta version solve this?

4

Nice.

Just moved my TB snap to the beta channel. No glitches, no problems. And, what do you know? The stable TB snap had problems subscribing to my (local) Nextcloud calendar. The beta did it without a hitch. No idea what bits have been flipped where, but it Just Works™.

Great job.

Will continue using/testing.

5

Following up here, after debugging the issue isn’t a Thunderbird or snap one. The problem is that file-roller unpacks files from the archives to ~/.cache, in the mentioned bug the user tries to open a odt using the libreoffice snap or snaps are denied access to .directories in the userdir for security reasons…