lucid thunderbird moves .mozilla-thunderbird folder from hardy to .thunderbird.upstream

[Bernhard M. Wiedemann]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

On a machine I had installed ubuntu-hardy (32 bit) having

# dpkg -l|grep thunderbird
ii thunderbird 2.0.0.24+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1 mail/news client with RSS and integrated spa
ii thunderbird-locale-de 1:2.0.0.14+1-0ubuntu1~8.04.1 Thunderbird German language/region package
ii thunderbird-locale-en-gb 1:2.0.0.14+1-0ubuntu1~8.04.1 Thunderbird English language/region package

6 days ago I installed ubuntu-lucid (beta2+upgrades) on a new partition, keeping homedirs on NFS.
new versions are
# dpkg -l | grep thunderbird
ii thunderbird 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 mail/news client with RSS and integrated spa
ii thunderbird-locale-de 1:3.0.4-0ubuntu1 Thunderbird German language/region package

Actual Results:
I found yesterday that thunderbird did not start. Running "thunderbird" on command-line did not produce any message either. return/error code was 1.

Further investigation showed that it replaced the .mozilla-thunderbird folder with a symlink to .thunderbird, which would be OK, but it also had .thunderbird as a symlink to .thunderbird, breaking things.

.mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/beyer/.thunderbird
.thunderbird -> /home/beyer/.thunderbird
It appears that the old .mozilla-thunderbird folder was moved to .thunderbird.upstream on first start of thunderbird.

Expected Results:
 thunderbird should start using old mail settings (and address book), preferably in a way that still allows old thunderbird to work on the same configuration data.

# lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu lucid (development branch)
Release: 10.04

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. You are probably experiencing bug 563893. The only people who got 2 symlinks were people that upgraded to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2. This was quickly replaced with 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 which checks for the existence of a symlink before moving the .mozilla-thunderbird profile out of the way. All you need to do is remove the recursive .thunderbird symlink and move .thunderbird.upstream back to .thunderbird and everything should be fine. I would not suggest running Thunderbird 2 from the same profile after upgrading to Thunderbird 3.