[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Moving Thunderbird 78.x to 91.x

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hi,

I wanted to write some notes about the new ESR series of Thunderbird 91 
for a while, but never came to. So I'll do it now.

The old Thunderbird ESR version 78.x has reached it's EOL with the 
release of 78.15.0 about two weeks ago. But as you probably have noticed 
there is no upload of packaging work happen until now.
This isn't related to a lack of time on my side, the main reasoning is 
simply MZLN hasn't released any source public yet. And I expect not 
really some urgent response here from MZLN. I've poked this circumstance 
now for the second time within the internal mailing list, but due the 
weekend no response before Monday will happen I think.

OTOH this shouldn't be a real issue, there are only two CVE got fixed by 
the newer version.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-44/

For some time I've uploaded versions for 91.x to experimental. This 
works from the packaging side better than ever, the previous first new 
ESR versions did make much more trouble on my side due the need to quite 
heavily adjust the patch queue at this time.
Currently i386 is known broken due modifications within the source and 
this on the Firefox side.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1729459

If no source for 78.15.0 will get provided in the next days I'm gone 
start to merge the current development branch debian/experimental back 
into debian/sid and look out for potential build issues like versions 
requirements for build dependencies, typical candidates are icu, rust 
and cargo.

The next step is then to prepare packaging for stable-security and 
oldstable-security. It's not completely clear right now how much is 
already possible in this part, we will also need updated build 
dependencies again at least for rutsc and due this potential also for 
llvm and so on. But don't expect a quick solution for this problem. ;)
The security team is checking the options on this.

So, like in my previous emails about the potential introducing of a 
newer Thunderbird ESR version I please to test the current version of 
Thunderbird in experimental! In case you need a option to switch back to 
78.x please make as usual a backup of your profile date first!
I'm not aware currently of any big issues for 91.x, I'm using versions 
from experimental for a long time now and I'm happy about the 
functionality and behavior.

-- 
Regards
Carsten