Update to 115.0

[flathubbot]

Started test build 52623

[flathubbot]

Build 52623 successful To test this build, install it from the testing repository:

flatpak install --user https://dl.flathub.org/build-repo/35260/org.mozilla.Thunderbird.flatpakref

[EliasOfWaffle]

[flathubbot]

Started test build 52640

[flathubbot]

Build 52640 successful To test this build, install it from the testing repository:

flatpak install --user https://dl.flathub.org/build-repo/35278/org.mozilla.Thunderbird.flatpakref

[flathubbot]

Started test build 52644

[flathubbot]

Build 52644 failed

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Started test build 52649

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Build 52649 failed

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Started test build 52650

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Build 52650 failed

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Started test build 52651

[flathubbot]

Build 52651 successful To test this build, install it from the testing repository:

flatpak install --user https://dl.flathub.org/build-repo/35289/org.mozilla.Thunderbird.flatpakref

[StayPirate]

I'm looking forward to get the new update, but I read from the TB blog post that they now manage the flatpak package at the upstream level, kind of what Mozilla is currently doing for Firefox (I guess). Hence, I'm no longer sure this is the right way to update TB in Flathub. Or maybe, @EliasOfWaffle is part of the upstream appointed to update the the flatpak package.

[ieugen]

@StayPirate : if you check the link in the blog post: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/07/our-fastest-most-beautiful-release-ever-thunderbird-115-supernova-is-here/ , you will see it refers to this repo.

[Erick555]

This sentence from blog post is premature, the transition flatpak to upstream is planned but didn't happened yet (to my knowledge).

The 115 release (same as every other major release) isn't initially available as upgrade:

As with any major release, we sometimes become aware of corner cases after significant public testing. The Thunderbird team will wait to enable automatic updates until we’re confident no such issues exist. We’ll keep you posted right here, and on social media platforms. (Existing Thunderbird 102 users will continue to see security updates during this time).

for this reason I don't plan to publish it to stable branch yet and use beta instead. I don't know what Thunderbird Team will do in future.

[StayPirate]

Gotcha, @Erick555 can you link me to where the discussion with the upstream is going on? I'd like to get an idea about how and when the transition will occur. Thanks

[farribeiro]

Is this pr good to go? @Erick555

[StayPirate]

AFAIU @Erick555 will merge it only after the upstream will enable the automatic updates for TB 115. In the meantime you can download from the Flathub beta branch.

[ghost]

thunderbird on flathub beta seems to be outdated - 114.0b1 installed with flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.Thunderbird.flatpakref

[Erick555]

Gotcha, @Erick555 can you link me to where the discussion with the upstream is going on? I'd like to get an idea about how and when the transition will occur. Thanks

There is no public discussion, you may track progress here. I was told that they planned to do something tomorrow but there are still some issues to handle so I don;t know if it's real date.

[EliasOfWaffle]

I'm looking forward to get the new update, but I read from the TB blog post that they now manage the flatpak package at the upstream level, kind of what Mozilla is currently doing for Firefox (I guess). Hence, I'm no longer sure this is the right way to update TB in Flathub. Or maybe, @EliasOfWaffle is part of the upstream appointed to update the the flatpak package.

Sorry i'm not member of the upstream team, I'm just a newbie with nothing to do who submitted this pull request The ThunderBird oficial release look's to be independent and will be made by the ThunderBird Team, i'm thinking

[EliasOfWaffle]

Gotcha, @Erick555 can you link me to where the discussion with the upstream is going on? I'd like to get an idea about how and when the transition will occur. Thanks

There is no public discussion, you may track progress here. I was told that they planned to do something tomorrow but there are still some issues to handle so I don;t know if it's real date.

In this case the better is to 115 this will be just in flathub beta yet for now?

[EliasOfWaffle]

Gotcha, @Erick555 can you link me to where the discussion with the upstream is going on? I'd like to get an idea about how and when the transition will occur. Thanks

There is no public discussion, you may track progress here. I was told that they planned to do something tomorrow but there are still some issues to handle so I don;t know if it's real date.

Could a pull request for the beta be good for updating some dependencies? or in this case is it better to keep the current way?

Some of things that had modified is LLVM 15 to 16 and Node 16 to 18 LTS, in this case the better is to this update will be made after a new Freedesktop SDK release?

[Erick555]

Thunderbird team published something to flathub-beta in May although it's very broken. I need to consult what they are planning to do next. For now I'm refraining from making any changes in stable or beta.

[farribeiro]

@Erick555 the bugzilla was closed

[jpeeler]

Do you think Mozilla would be mad if you fixed the beta branch with a working v115? I can appreciate wanting to not create confusion with a premature standard release, but v115.0.1 is out now. As far as updates being enabled, this post is saying that it'll be August before that happens.

[Erick555]

Please ask about this on TB mailing list or matrix channel.

[wsmwk]

Do you think Mozilla would be mad if you fixed the beta branch with a working v115? I can appreciate wanting to not create confusion with a premature standard release, but v115.0.1 is out now. As far as updates being enabled, this post is saying that it'll be August before that happens.

For some reason my email from this morning to github didn't get posted ...

The release team discussed flatpak yesterday, Thursday. The build pipeline preparations needed for us to ship flatpak are very close to completed, so we determined that we will shoot for shipping flatpak v115 next week.

And you are right, we don't want to create confusion. But please understand that we have not yet enabling automatic updates to version 115 for our own distributions. We have not yet even enabled manual updates, because we want to control the number of users getting version 115 until more patches have been shipped. Yesterday the first patched version is out, 115.0.1, so we will now start making it easier for more users to get version 115.

We understand user excitement, but as with all big major releases it is probably prudent for users to exercise patience when it comes to a) wanting a new version and b) having the provider make it available. We typically have very good reasons for the new version not being instantly available in every channel.

Wayne Thunderbird release manager

[jberkus]

@wsmwk will TB be shipping flatpaks of each major version as it releases in the future? Or will you be skipping several versions at a time, as has been de-facto the case with the current repo?

[wsmwk]

@wsmwk will TB be shipping flatpaks of each major version as it releases in the future? Or will you be skipping several versions at a time, as has been de-facto the case with the current repo?

I don't know what has been happening with the flatpak repo in the past.

With Thunderbird assuming control of the flatpak maintenance, in the future it will mirror what is available for linux at thunderbird.net.

[Justinzobel]

This really is confusing and somewhat annoying. I and likely others use Flatpak because they want the latest stable release of software immediately. I get that Mozilla wants to make this an official release avenue but holding back updates is not the solution.

If 115 has not been sufficiently tested before being released, why was it released? If it's expected to be released to early adopters for testing, that is what the beta channel is for, so you can get user feedback before releasing to the general users.

If major issues popup in flatpaks, they can be easily reverted to the last known working version or bugfix releases can be applied and pushed out to users quickly.

It sounds like there needed to be more planning around the move to flatpak being an official release so regular updates e.g. 115 can still be sent out to users by the volunteers that are maintaining this on Flathub.

[StayPirate]

This really is confusing and somewhat annoying. I and likely others use Flatpak because they want the latest stable release of software immediately. I get that Mozilla wants to make this an official release avenue but holding back updates is not the solution.

If 115 has not been sufficiently tested before being released, why was it released? If it's expected to be released to early adopters for testing, that is what the beta channel is for, so you can get user feedback before releasing to the general users.

I switched to use many packages in flatpak for the same reason... I want security updates ASAP, at least for some sw which are highly exposed to the internet (e.g. browser and MUA). But, rolling out an update in multiple steps is a commonly used practice in sw development. We should not blame the upstream (or the current flatpak maintainer) for choosing to take safe steps.

If major issues popup in flatpaks, they can be easily reverted to the last known working version or bugfix releases can be applied and pushed out to users quickly.

I'm not sure about that, in part I agree with you as releasing a fix in flatpak could be very easy and quick... so exploiting flatpak's users as first deployment set could be a nice move for the future, once the upstream will have took over this repo. At the same time I heard upstream talking about automated-updates.... I don't know for which platform are they intended. In the linux world you always have to wait your distro to repack the new TB version in order to get an update. Maybe automated updates are only true for windows and mac osx?? Automated updates sound the best place where to spread initial deployments of major releases, as in case of problems no action are required from the user. With flatpak the user have to run the flatpak update command.

Anyway, if automated updates are not a think for linux, maybe the best place for testing linux users is Flathub.

It sounds like there needed to be more planning around the move to flatpak being an official release so regular updates e.g. 115 can still be sent out to users by the volunteers that are maintaining this on Flathub.

I think that the only misstep taken by upstream was suggesting to linux users to use flatpak as it's the new official method directly managed by the TB team.... while that's wanted is still not true, and it only caused confusion.

From the blog post:

If it’s convenient for you, we recommend installing the Thunderbird Flatpak from Flathub, which is now packaged and maintained by the Thunderbird team.

[wsmwk]

What I failed to state in my previous posting (but I posted in some other venue) is that our release automation process needed to supply flatpak automatically was not finished by July 11. So even if we had wanted to provide 115 immediately on flatpak, we weren't going to do a one off manual update for the sake of providing it a week or two earlier was possible with automation. It's not a small amount of work for the team given our current workload.

From the blog post: If it’s convenient for you, we recommend installing the Thunderbird Flatpak from Flathub, which is now packaged and maintained by the Thunderbird team.

It also clearly states "Please note that 115 is not live on Flathub at time of publication, but as always we’ll keep you updated."

This is a big change for everyone. Patience will be appreciated.

[tomkv]

Opinion: other projects have also saw this issue, and solved them for everyone to be happy. For example, the QGIS project (org.qgis.qgis on flathub) has two branches: "stable" and "lts". The stable branch has the latest stable version, the lts branch has the long-term supported one.

So my suggestion would be to also have two branches there, in the stable repo: "stable", which would behave exactly as the autoupdate on other platforms (i.e. would switch to 115 cca at the end of september) and "esr-next" (or other, appropriate name), where the released stable versions would be available immediately. Switching the branch requires user action, so those who want it could get it, and users on autoupdates doing nothing would get the default esr behavior.

The difference between "esr-next" and beta is, that as of now, the released 115.0.x versions are not beta. For other platforms, they were released in the stable stream, so Linux users should also have them available in the stable stream.

[StayPirate]

Something weird is happening to me right now (or maybe simply sth I can't get)... if I now run flatpak update I see an update for TB which request additional permissions (nothing too intrusive):

> flatpak update
Looking for updates…

New org.mozilla.Thunderbird permissions:
    dbus access [1]       bus ownership [2]       system dbus access [3]

    [1] org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.gtk.vfs.*
    [2] org.mozilla.Thunderbird.*, org.mozilla.Thunderbird_beta.*
    [3] org.freedesktop.NetworkManager

        ID                                       Branch           Op           Remote           Download
 1.     org.mozilla.Thunderbird.Locale           stable           u            flathub          < 41.1 MB (partial)
 2.     org.mozilla.Thunderbird                  stable           u            flathub          < 92.1 MB

Proceed with these changes to the user installation? [Y/n]: 

What I find weird is that the last commit in the master branch of this repo is 3w old (https://github.com/flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/commit/6de2c2150a89076f41c5b91c6fbc42707748851f), hence I think the updated was not triggered from here. Maybe someone with r/w access to the Flathub repo manually pushed a new package? But again, if I look at Flathub the last package is dated 3w ago:

From where this update is coming from and what changes is bringing? As for now, I wait before to update.

PS: Yes, I'm on the stable branch.

[Erick555]

Flatpak is now managed by Thunderbird team - it's uploaded to flathub repo directly from Thunderbird servers. There will be no more updates from github repo.

[StayPirate]

Flatpak is now managed by Thunderbird team - it's uploaded to flathub repo directly from Thunderbird servers. There will be no more updates from github repo.

Cool, do you know why that is not reflected in https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.Thunderbird? Maybe it needs some time because of cache/slow pipelines?

[StayPirate]

Flatpak is now managed by Thunderbird team - it's uploaded to flathub repo directly from Thunderbird servers. There will be no more updates from github repo.

Moreover, should we update the README.md of this repo accordingly and/or archive the repo? Just to make it clear.

[farribeiro]

Mark this repo as EoL and/or archive or also turn private

[Erick555]

Yes, the repo should be archived - I'll contact flathub admins about that.

[StayPirate]

please do not make it private, public history is important. Just archive it.