evolution-data-server addon not working in the snap

[StevenT]

Currently Thunderbird does not include the calendar-service interface provided by the core snap in its yaml file. The calendar-service enables snap apps to communicate with the evolution-data-server. Though Thunderbird does not yet natively communicate with EDS, there exists an EDS Calendar Integration add-on for Thunderbird that allows synchronization of Thunderbird calendars with EDS. One immediate benefit is that users will be able to see calendar events listed in the time/date gnome widget.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, the request makes sense, it has been added to the beta channel and will be in the next build

https://github.com/ubuntu/thunderbird/commit/0626db59

Once confirmed to work we will cherrypick to stable

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The new revision in the beta channel of the store includes the change if you want to give it a try

[StevenT (steventhompson)]

On 5/9/23 2:05 PM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> The new revision in the beta channel of the store includes the change if
> you want to give it a try
>

I'll do that in next couple of days. Thanks for the speedy response!

Steve

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Did you have a chance to try it?

[StevenT (steventhompson)]

On 5/25/23 6:33 AM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Did you have a chance to try it?
>
Yes, and unfortunately it wasn't successful. According to the debug log
for the addon, it's not able find libecal-1.2 or libecal-2.0.

It's seems to be the same issue that the Thunderbird flatpak version has
with the EDS addon as described here:
https://github.com/balbusm/xul-ext-eds-calendar/issues/50

Even with installing the beta version in developer mode, it's still not
able to find libecal-2.0 on the host. I thought it was odd that running
ldconfig -p |grep libecal in a shell within the thunderbird snap will
list libecal-2.0.so.1 in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/, but ls
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libecal* shows no such file.

I did install the test-snapd-eds snap as a way to test the calendar
service interface outside of thunderbird, but ran into the same issue
where the snap tried to load an older libecal-1.2.so.19 (I think that
was the version) library, but couldn't find it.

I think the issue most likely lies with the addon, but without a way to
test whether the calendar service interface first works correctly with a
snap, I wouldn't be able to provide the addon developer any useful
information on how it should work as that's getting well above my level
of expertise.

So reverted back to the stable release as I don't dig the interface
changes to the beta version and will wait to see if the developer can
get the addon to work with the flatpak without breaking its confinement
policy.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for testing. Indeed now that you mention it, e-d-s is tricky in the sense that the dbus protocol has been changing between versions which makes it difficult to build one client package that works on different series or distributions. Also the thunderbird snap is strictly confined so can't access the libraries from the system so we would need to add those to the snap itself (but it wouldn't resolve the protocol changing, some flatpak workaround that by providing their own e-d-s service bundled...)