@seb128 - can you confirm if gpg-keys is needed at all with portals support? If not, this reduces down to just cups-control from what I can see. The current process for auto-connect of cups-control is limited to printing and design applications where printing is part of the expected workflow. As such, Thunderbird does not strictly fit this definition as it is not a printing / design application. However, I tend to agree that printing of emails is a pretty common operation (similar to say printing of web-pages as we grant for chromium) - and so I vote +1 for auto-connect of cups-control for thunderbird myself.
gpg-keys is needed only for the automatic migration from old profiles which used enigmail or for the gpg configuration dialog to be able to list existing keys (which isn’t mandatory since it’s easier to pick from a list than go pick a file on disk from the portal)
@seb128 so the issue I have is that gpg-keys is pretty sensitive and so I don’t feel that it should be auto-connected - is there a way we could have thunderbird first try and detect whether gpg-keys is connected (snapctl is-connected gpg-keys) just before showing the dialog to list existing keys, and if not ask the user to connect it? This would provide a good UX IMO and allow this to be manually connected still.
It would make things easier if ubuntu LTS update debs to 78.x which will make migration case ignorable as virtually all users will be past it then.
AFAIK every other distro already did update including debian oldstable and it’s surprising ubuntu didn’t considering there are dozens of unfixed CVE in old release.
@alexmurray right, I’ve edited the request to remove the gpg-keys item which let the cups-control one. The 'import dialog" is not going to list existing keys in the main view but it’s possible to go and pick an individual file which should be enough. We can still try to do something as you suggested also for migration
@Reynolds5 the update is being worked but isn’t trivial, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1895643 for details. The 78.5.0 update is in focal-proposed now (to get extra testing before going to securite)
Hopefully with those questions sorted out we can get another vote on the printing interface autoconnect
+1 to auto-connect cups-control since it is expected that an email client be able to print emails. Ideally this would use the printing portal, but the snap doesn’t do this yet.
2 votes for, 0 against for auto-connection of cups-control. Granting auto-connection. This is now live.