Thunderbird 91 was recently released as an el8 update. Per the spec, it seems RHEL doesn’t want to ship librnp.so and adds a patch to disable openpgp. OK, fine.
No word yet on something else to install with it to supply the missing functionality.
Someone (CentOS?) created a thunderbird “plus” release which retains openpgp functionality. Great! But the trick is how to easily upgrade to the plus version? Note it is in the “plus” repo (Rocky-Plus.repo), which is disabled by default.
With thunderbird-78.14.0-1.el8_4.x86_64 installed,
dnf -q --enablerepo=plus list thunderbird
Installed Packages
thunderbird.x86_64 78.14.0-1.el8_4 @appstream
Available Packages
thunderbird.x86_64 91.2.0-1.el8_4 appstream
Nope, that’s not the plus version - perhaps because “el8.plus” sorts before “el8_4”?
dnf -q --enablerepo=plus --disablerepo=appstream list available thunderbird
Available Packages
thunderbird.x86_64 91.2.0-1.el8.plus plus
yum/dnf priorities is not a good answer as it forever prefers the repo with the lower priority number.
My hack is to rebuild from source using mock, bumping the Release version slightly so the first digit is bigger (2 vs 1) than the appstream version, betting on the chance the next real update will be a version update (not just a release bump). I put this into my own “myrepo” which is configured on all my hosts, and it is selected.
dnf -q list available thunderbird
Available Packages
thunderbird.x86_64 91.2.0-2.el8.plus myrepo
But clearly, this is not a great solution. Any better ideas out there?