Debian 10166 Published by

Mozilla Thunderbird is back in Debian



Hi Debian Developers and followers,

Thunderbird is back in Debian! We also renamed other related packages to
use official names, e.g. iceowl-extension -> lightning.

For now, we need testers to catch existing issues and things we haven't seen
until now.

What happens the first time you start Thunderbird?

With the change to the official Mozilla branding the users profile(s) will also
be changing from '$HOME/.icedove' to '$HOME/.thunderbird' so we need to migrate
the profile folder. This is done by /usr/bin/thunderbird, a wrapper script,
which does the following things during initial startup:

* Copy the contents of the old profile folder into the new folder ~/.icedove_moved_by_thunderbird_starter
* Fixup Icedove related entries to Thunderbird in ~/.thunderbird/$PROFILE/mimeTypes.rdf
* Fixup Icedove related entries to Thunderbird in ~/.config/mimeapps.list
* The postinst/postrm scripts will move existing configuration files from /etc/icedove/pref to /etc/thunderbird/pref.

What needs to be tested?
* Are the mime type associations still correct?
* Is the migration working in various Desktop Environments?
* Did we miss some files that need to be handled?

What should I prepare for testing?
Please keep a backup of your old ~/.icedove folder! Also please backup
the file ~/.config/mimeapps.list (if your DE is using this) before
installing the thunderbird packages. You'll find additional notes in
'/usr/share/doc/thunderbird/README.Debian'.

If you find some issue, please open a bug report. Patches of course are
welcome!

We like to say thanks to all people that are involved and helped to do the
migration!

Cheers,
Carsten, Guido and Christoph