Looking to Snap up Thunderbird

Hey, Ryan here.

Just recently became Community Manager over at the Thunderbird project. I’m looking for some assistance from the community in snapping up Thunderbird and building that into our process so that we can push this out with each release (and get it published as a snap).

Anyone wanna join us in helping TB get this process up-and-going and streamlined?

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Hi @ryanleesipes,

You should talk with @kenvandine, he is leading all desktop snap related initiatives and can help point you in the right direction :slight_smile:

A snapped Thunderbird would be great. If I may make a suggestion, if you undertake this, please make sure from the start that the snapped package can use enigmail and GPG. For me this is absolutely essential.

I have a snap for thunderbird already, works well just pending security review in the store. Ultimately I’d really like the snap generated as part of the upstream thunderbird CI process.

I’ll let you know when it’s available for further testing.

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That’s great @kenvandine - I can intro you to our guy who manages our CI once you are ready to have us poke at it. Are you packaging the last stable release? The beta? The nightly? Would love to hear more.

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Latest beta, 58.0b2 right now. We can have separate tracks for the beta and stable versions in the store as well.

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This is approved now, though you’ll need to release it to a channel.

@jdstrand thanks!

I’ve published thunderbird 58.0b2 to the beta channel.

@ryanleesipes please try it out and let me know if you find issues. I’d really appreciate it if you could put me in touch with the right folks to get this part of your regular builds.

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@kenvandine I tried the Thunderbird snap on 18.04 daily. I’m going to spoil your mood, sorry :frowning:

$ snap install thunderbird --beta
thunderbird (beta) 58.0b2 from 'ken-vandine' installed
$ snap run thunderbird
fish: “snap run thunderbird” terminated by signal SIGSYS (Bad system call)   

This was captured in /var/log/syslog:

Dec 21 12:58:52 skull kernel: [254686.973585] audit: type=1326 audit(1513861132.857:3165): auid=4294967295 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=4294967295 pid=21805 comm="thunderbird-bin" exe="/snap/thunderbird/2/thunderbird-bin" sig=31 arch=c000003e syscall=272 compat=0 ip=0x7f47a5d63499 code=0x0

The snap declaration wasn’t granted for using ‘allow-sandbox: true’ with browser-support. I adjusted that; please either connect the interface manually and/or remove/install and try again.

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Thanks @jdstrand, it’s working now.

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mood restored :stuck_out_tongue:

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@kenvandine can you ping me with your Email address, I will intro you to the proper folks to get this implemented as part of our process.

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@ryanleesipes you can reach me at ken.vandine@canonical.com

Thanks,
Ken

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Any advance to see thunderbird as snap soon?

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@ryanleesipes @kenvandine any update on this?

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Do: “sudo snap install thunderbird --beta”
Then: “snap run thunderbird”

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Was Thunderbird abandoned on snap? It is not updated, on the beta channel is to the version: “beta: 58.0b3 (3)”, “edge: 59.0b2 (11) 130MB”
I also have the following problems:

  1. When the startup has the old problem that creates the folders on the home, I have the language in Italian and then the various folders: Documenti, Scaricati etc …, if I start thunderbird creates other folders: Download etc. … Annoying problem.

  2. It does not have permission to access external disks, so I can not take attachments from my data disc: /media/users/data

  3. Does not respect the desktop theme.

Update: Another problem is the translation, available only in English

@kenvandine Hello, can you update snap to 60? If not then I recommend to remove it as an outdated beta doesn’t make sense to be publicly available store.

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So I referenced https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ken-vandine/thunderbird/snap/view/head:/snapcraft.yaml to create my own snap of thunderbird. everything looks to be fine. Is it pending a review of snap or it needs more testing? Hasnt broken for me yet though.

I also noted that the snap included alot of things which I seemed unnecessary. Things like camera and audio plugs or mir stage-packages.

DId away with them and found that they arent needed for my use case.