Bug 1108758

Releasing Thunderbird 60.0 as a maintenance (security) update was my call and I stand by it. I did this after testing the version in my personal work setup for more than week a week or so.

The only Thunderbird extension we package in the distribution is enigmail, which has long established compatibility with 60. For the distribution package enigmail, obviously, we made sure that this works. We have no influence over what third party extensions do, some of them will delay their compatibility while others will never update. The distribution has no influence over that, a work-around configuration for strict compatibility checking is available. 

The only known start-up bug is bug 1107772 which was reported/confirmed by 2-3 users and resolved upstream at this point. Wolfgang noted the release timing, so this will be in the next update.

TB 52 is EOL, I am against adding compatibility option for the reason noted by Ludwig. Frankly I am not sure what is to be gained from that other than a small delay. The extensions problems would have happened anyway, and bug 1107772 is a single datapoint from which I would never extrapolate a request such as this one.

you don't seem to be in a hurry for SLE with Thunderbird?
The problem here is that there was no indication, no warning at all that this update breaks things. Then when you want to get work done and suddenly the mail client just lacks all the features that's plain annoying.
If 52 is EOL why doesn't upstream offer 60 as update? Or is that information wrong on upstream side?

From what it seems there is no further 52.x version planned. As Firefox released a more recent ESR version meanwhile it exposed possible security issues to the public.
My understanding from upstream is that 60.0 was not released via the auto update but later versions will. 60.1 (now renamed to 60.2) was due last week and got only delayed because of some release engineering issues and the renumbering. The candidates were already available public. I expect that upstream will enable auto update from 52 to 60.2 soon after release which means within the next two weeks presumably.
So avoiding the update would have brought some delay as Andreas pointed out but not helping much with the fact itself.
Communication is another topic which IMHO could really be better. I wasn't sure when the update for releases would happen exactly but on the other hand I didn't expect such a big issue as well. I only have 6 extensions in Thunderbird but at least for me 100% of them just continued to work as before.

Created attachment 783435 [details]
screenshot

ok, so thunderbird is fooling me. It shows all add-ons as incompatible with 60 and claims that there are no updates. Even clicking the buttons to check all for updates, reset all to auto-update, click "find updates" on individual add-ons doesn't help. Looking at quickfolder however it does have updates upstream and should be compatible with 60 indeed.

(In reply to Ludwig Nussel from comment #2)
> you don't seem to be in a hurry for SLE with Thunderbird?

Well... it took some fixing...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1486376

The SLE submission was sent 4 minutes and 7 seconds later than the Leap maintenance submission. And in the light of bug 1107772 the SLE update was stopped to either include the regression fix, or, more likely, take 60.2.0 ESR.

> The problem here is that there was no indication, no warning at all that
> this update breaks things.

The mistake or omission in past patch description
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2018-09/msg00034.html
was already discussed in the mailing list. I am not sure what this bug is trying to achieve?

> Then when you want to get work done and suddenly
> the mail client just lacks all the features that's plain annoying.

So this is just venting? Again, your third party extensions are not distribution features, and I doubt that your particular collection will be made compatible with ESR 60 in time.

> If 52 is EOL why doesn't upstream offer 60 as update?
> Or is that information wrong on upstream side?

Upstream has chosen not to offer this as an automatic update. I have chosen to ship the security and version update with included other bug fixes - and apparently you cannot please everyone. Thunderbird 60.2.0 ESR will be shipped soon after it is available and probably address these things. It will be tested with Enigmail as usually. Other third party extensions will not get special consideration.

(In reply to Ludwig Nussel from comment #4)
> Created attachment 783435 [details]
> screenshot
> 
> ok, so thunderbird is fooling me. It shows all add-ons as incompatible with
> 60 and claims that there are no updates. Even clicking the buttons to check
> all for updates, reset all to auto-update, click "find updates" on
> individual add-ons doesn't help. Looking at quickfolder however it does have
> updates upstream and should be compatible with 60 indeed.

Set "extensions.strictCompatibility" in about:config to false should bring your addons back. The issue with lightning is a different story (cf. https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=939153#c29).

Ok, thanks. With manual tweaking, disabling strict compat and installing quickfolders manually I was able to get back to a usable Thunderbird. Nevertheless an embarrassing situation to happen with a seemingly harmless maintenance update. This just kills productivity and sheds a bad light on Leap :-(

So what we lack in the update stack is a way to highlight potentially problematic updates.

I still don't get why this update was fast tracked for Leap and held back for SLE though.

From https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.2.1/releasenotes/

> Thunderbird version 60.2.1 provides an automatic update from Thunderbird version 52.