Thunderbird 91 w/o OpenPGP or "Plus"

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?

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Add excludepkgs=thunderbird into definition of AppStream?

For example, with:

dnf config-manager --save --setopt=appstream.excludepkgs=thunderbird
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If the “Plus” repo is already enabled, then you may select the “Plus” repo with the following syntax:

dnf --repo=plus install thunderbird

Hi,

Just registered here to say “thank you” to you all! You just saved me quite a few additional hours of frustration while migrating to my new workstation (CentOS 6.10 → RHEL8.5)…

What I did on my RedHat Enterprise Linux 8.5, first I removed RedHat’s version of Thunderbird:

# dnf remove thunderbird

Then, i dumped the Rocky plus repository into /etc/yum.repos.d/Rocky-plus.repo as superuser root in disabled form:

[plus]
name=Rocky Linux $releasever - Plus
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirrorlist?arch=$basearch&repo=rockyplus-$releasever
#baseurl=http://dl.rockylinux.org/$contentdir/$releasever/rockyplus/$basearch/os/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rockyofficial

To make gpgcheck=1 work, I had to import Rocky Linux’ official GPG key:

# rpm --import https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/RPM-GPG-KEY-rockyofficial

Blacklisted RedHat’s thunderbird package, similar to what jlehtone mentioned (I had to change the repo name as seen below):

# dnf config-manager --save --setopt=rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms.excludepkgs=thunderbird

Alright, now the repository isn’t enabled by default (not sure if it would be safe after all), so I explicitly request thunderbird for installation from it:

# dnf --enablerepo=plus install thunderbird

And it’s solved! While not actually running Rocky Linux, it still made my life on RHEL8 a little easier, so again: Thank you for that! :sunglasses:

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