Why does Fedora Flatpaks offer two (apparently identical) versions of Thunderbird?

Ask Fedora
, ,
1 
Thunderbird  org.mozilla.thunderbird      152.0    stable flathub
Thunderbird  net.thunderbird.Thunderbird  151.0.1  stable fedora,fedora-testing
Thunderbird  org.mozilla.Thunderbird               stable fedora,fedora-testing

Context

  • It was recommended to me. [1]

  • Fedora Flatpaks are the default, over FlatHub.

  • FlatHub Beta is practically unmaintained.

  • Fedora Testing can be newer than even FlatHub Beta.

  1. t/194042/4 ↩︎

2

According to @tqcharm here, net.thunderbird.Thunderbird corresponds to the latest Mozilla release, and org.mozilla.Thunderbird is the ESR.

3

@pg-tips, thanks. In that case, FlatHub communicates this better, with a more consistent identifier, and an actual version number applied:

Thunderbird      org.mozilla.thunderbird      152.0b4      beta    flathub-beta
Thunderbird ESR  org.mozilla.thunderbird_esr  140.12.0esr  stable  flathub
Thunderbird      org.mozilla.thunderbird      152.0        stable  flathub

I’d like to suggest that that be remediated, but I doubt that it’d be considered to be a bug. Excepting, perhaps, the absent version number.

4

The Flathub change is fairly recent. Until last month or so, only the ESR was available, and that was org.mozilla.Thunderbird with an uppercase T. Then that name was retired, and now we have the setup you show there.

Maybe Fedora will ultimately follow this. However, changing the name isn’t friction-free - flatpak update (and the GUI software managers) could transitioned you automatically from org.mozilla.Thunderbird to org.mozilla.thunderbird_esr, but didn’t rename the directory in ~/.var/app to match the new app name. So if you didn’t figure out that you needed to do that, you apparently lost your data.

5

@pg-tips, support.mozilla.org/kb/channel-choices-thunderbird-snap-and-flatpak appears to indicate that one shouldn’t experience data loss from that.

6

I found from experience that flatpak update doesn’t handle renaming of ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird for you. So there’s no actual data loss, but it looks like there is, until you realise what has happened.

It would be good for Mozilla to mention this on the page really.

7

@pg-tips, I agree. If you want to, ./edit should allow you to:

8

Thanks, I hadn’t noticed you could do that! I submitted an edit.

9

@pg-tips, honestly, nor had I, until I posted that. :sweat_smile: