Thunderbird LATEST vs ESR

[giacgbj]

Verification

• I understand that if I ignore these instructions, my issue may be closed without review.
• I have retried my command with --force.
• I ran brew update-reset && brew update and retried my command.
• I ran brew doctor, fixed as many issues as possible and retried my command.
• I have checked the instructions for reporting bugs.
• I made doubly sure this is not a checksum does not match / SHA256 mismatch error (do not open an issue before trying to open a PR to fix first).

Description of issue

It seems that Thunderbird cask should follow ESR channel instead of LATEST or, at least, create different casks.
Launching the latest (131), Thunderbird shows the following warning:

Command that failed

Output of command with --verbose --debug

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Output of brew doctor and brew config

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Output of brew tap

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[Bo98]

Mozilla's communication on this has been very confusing. In the previous announcement they made it clear that monthly releases are not the same as betas: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-128-nebula-faq

We took data from https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/thunderbird_versions.json and LATEST_THUNDERBIRD_VERSION has historically always been the latest stable version (https://web.archive.org/web/20240212012428/https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/thunderbird_versions.json). ESR is a very new entry.

Seems like they've suddenly changed the definition of what "latest" means to now mean a beta, breaking any scripts that use that API in the process.

Based on https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/T10766b2d0c60c029/product-details-update-for-monthly-releases, it seems like "latest" will be the correct thing to use, but not for v131 so we need to temporarily move to ESR and then move back when ready.

[sdellenb]

Unfortunately, starting Thunderbird after the upgrade to 131.0 made my profile incompatible with 128.2.3esr.
There's no path back without setting everything up from scratch (or backup).

[Bo98]

In that case, we probably have no choice but to stick with it then. It's unfortunate that this happened. Unsurprisingly, we're not the only package manager affected (see Arch, Scoop etc.) as this change was announced on an obscure channel with just a few days notice. Even the documentation wasn't updated.

We will add a thunderbird@esr though. Not as a fix for this issue as it can't but simply because we always planned to offer both Stable and ESR versions, like we do for Firefox.

[NicoHaase]

I fully understand that this is neither the fault nor the responsibility of Homebrew's team, but do you recommend any action for endusers to handle this situation? Do we need to migrate to another cask? Or do you plan to migrate the "existing" Thunderbird cask to a different kind of release once that is ready?

[Bo98]

do you recommend any action for endusers to handle this situation? Do we need to migrate to another cask? Or do you plan to migrate the "existing" Thunderbird cask to a different kind of release once that is ready?

The monthly release channel will eventually become stable so we'll keep everyone on that branch until it does. The recommendation is to ignore the warning as it will be removed in a future release.

There is an ESR cask available too now but that is only for those who really don't want the warning and are okay with a new profile.