Enigmail is disabled, cannot be used at all (platform-specific to arm)

[Reimar Döffinger]

The enigmail addon shows as "disabled" in Thunderbird and cannot be enabled.
Unfortunately Thunderbird provides no information whatsoever on the reason.
From past experience I suspect this is due to the binaries in the addon, and Thunderbird and enigmail not agreeing on the name of the CPU architecture. Note this is on an ARM beagleboard.
Notice the supicious paths in the enigmail package, like platform/Linux_unknown
Note that I have no proof whatsoever that this is related to the issue though, it is just a guess.
I tried to debug it a bit myself with "strace -f -e open" but I couldn't even see it touch any files related to enigmail (but somehow it must detect it is installed, since it appears in the plugin list, but just it is disabled and there is no enable button).
Any help is appreciated.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: enigmail 2:1.5.2-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-54.82-omap 3.2.50
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-54-omap armv7l
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.5
Architecture: armhf
Date: Tue Oct 22 21:34:24 2013
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: enigmail
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Reimar Döffinger (reimar-doeffinger)]

I confirmed the exact issue and found a (only partially tested) solution.
First, find out the actual platform name:
$ strings /usr/lib/thunderbird/libxul.so | grep Linux_
Linux_arm-eabi-gcc3

So here for me, it is Linux_arm-eabi-gcc3
Then edit (as root)
/usr/lib/xul-ext/enigmail/install.rdf
(or whatever the install.rdf in the enigmail package is called)
Change the broken line
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_unknown</em:targetPlatform>
to match the proper platform:
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_arm-eabi-gcc3</em:targetPlatform>
I have tested that this makes all the menus etc. appear.
I have not yet tested that it makes the actual encryption work, it may or may not be necessary to rename the .so files, too.
Or at least change their entries in
/usr/lib/xul-ext/enigmail/chrome.manifest

[Reimar Döffinger (reimar-doeffinger)]

Just to clarify: this confirms that enigmail has been built/configured incorrectly and can't be working for _anyone_ running on ARM (and possibly other less common architectures as well).

[Reimar Döffinger (reimar-doeffinger)]

I can now confirm that changing one Linux_unknown in a single line in chrome.manifest in addition is necessary and sufficient for enigmail to work, the line after the change is from:
binary-component platform/Linux_unknown/components/libenigmime-unknown.so ABI=Linux_unknown platformversion<19.0a1
to:
binary-component platform/Linux_unknown/components/libenigmime-unknown.so ABI=Linux_arm-eabi-gcc3 platformversion<19.0a1

(and of course this is a huge hack I wouldn't expect any ordinary user to do, but it at least works for me - until those files get overwritten by the next update of course)

[Reimar Döffinger (reimar-doeffinger)]

Bug still exists in the just released version for 12.04.
I suspect it's pure chance and not related to anyone actually trying to fix this, but at least things are closer.
No changes to chrome.manifest seem to be necessary anymore.
However in /usr/lib/xul-ext/enigmail/install.rdf it is still necessary to change the line
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_arm-gcc3</em:targetPlatform>
to match the proper platform:
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_arm-eabi-gcc3</em:targetPlatform>

Yay, only the -eabi is missing instead of the nonsensical "unknown". Of course to an ordinary user it is still just as completely broken as before.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

This was apparently fixed in the last upload in Debian, another good reason to merge from Debian unstable as requested in bug 1392577

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=765937

[Mathew Hodson (mhodson)]

This was fixed in enigmail 1.7.2