Lightning extension should be installed and enabled by default

[Olivier Tilloy]

Upstream builds of thunderbird are now shipping lightning, and it is enabled by default.

In contrast, lightning in Ubuntu is a separate binary package (xul-ext-lightning), and it’s neither installed by default nor even recommended by thunderbird.

This results in confusion for users who don't know where to get lightning from.

The extension should be bundled with the thunderbird package, i.e. installed and enabled by default (as was done for the wetransfer file link provider, see bug #1823361).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

One of the reason we didn't enable it before is because from earlier Ubuntu we always tried to avoid having several applications doing the same job and we already have gnome-calendar installed by default as a calendar.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

That makes sense. Maybe we could reconsider that decision?

Quoting an e-mail from a thunderbird developer:

« In the Thunderbird community there has been quite a few discussions lately on the problems with that packaging, especially regarding the Lightning calendar. Thunderbird upstream is shipping Lightning bundled and on by default, but apparently in Ubuntu an explicit install decision needs to be made by the user. This has caused major problems for users who couldn't figure out how to get lightning, or why it didn't show up in the first place. »

People who have used upstream builds of thunderbird will expect lightning to be bundled. At the very least we can bundle it in the main thunderbird package, maybe not enabled by default? That would mostly fix the discoverability problem.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Having it installed by default but disabled and an opt-in does makes sense indeed

[hbchoong (hbchoong)]

Way to go Olivier, thanks very much!

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

The upcoming update to thunderbird 78 will have the calendar features of lightning integrated, thus fixing this bug.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thunderbird 78 is now in groovy, and in the process of being backported to focal, and later bionic and xenial.