Thunderbird prefs file references /usr/lib/thunderbird which doesn't exist

[Jonathan Reed]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

Thunderbird 3.0.7+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1 fails to look in /usr/lib/thunderbird for configuration files. It now only looks in /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0.7.

This is in direct conflict with /etc/thunderbird/pref/thunderbird.js, which says:
"""
// You can, with this file and all files present in the
// /etc/thunderbird/pref directory, override any preference that is
// present in /usr/lib/thunderbird/defaults/pref directory.
"""

For our site configuration, we set a new value for general.config.filename, and store that file in /usr/lib/thunderbird. This worked fine in Jaunty and Karmic. However, under Lucid, this causes Thunderbird to unfortunately exit with "Failed to read the configuration file", since it's looking for our config file in /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0.7.

If this is the new upstream behavior, that's fine, but then the comments in /etc/thunderbird/pref/thunderbird.js need to be updated to replace this. Additionally, it would be nice if there was some way to programmatically determine the name of that directory that was something other than "dpkg-query and sed".

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. You really should be storing those preferences in /etc/thunderbird/pref/, not /usr/lib/thunderbird. Starting with Thunderbird 3 we moved to a versioned lib directory. We should fix the reference in the prefs file. It worked in jaunty and karmic because the path didn't change on upgrade. Please report any other issues you may find.

[Jonathan Reed (jdreed)]

As of Thunderbird 16, Thunderbird is apparently back to looking in /usr/lib/thunderbird/defaults/pref and ignoring /etc/thunderbird/pref. (At least, strace'ing can find no attempts by Thunderbird to look in /etc/thunderbird for anything). No mention of this is made in the changelog.

This is incredibly annoying from a site configuration standpoint.