Re: proposed removal of Enigmail from jessie/LTS

[Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@orangeseeds.org>]

On 2018-12-20 14:30:49, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> fwiw, i agree with jmm that encouraging users to upgrade to stable is
> the best outcome here.  The question is, what are we doing to the folks
> who (for whatever reason) can't make that switch.
>
> On Thu 2018-12-20 17:01:30 +0100, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote:
>> If suddenly all kinds of core libraries are getting updated in jessie
>> (with minimal testing)
>
> we're not talking about "all kinds of core libraries" -- we're talking
> about a very selected subset.  And i don't think we're talking about
> "minimal testing", there has been a reasonable amount of testing.  I
> think we ought to consider this specific case, rather than trying to
> make a systematized rule.
>
>> EOLing enigmail seems the only sensible option by far.
>
> the main issue with EOLing enigmail is that users will (instead of
> upgrading to stable) typically just use the version from
> addons.mozilla.org, which has both non-DFSG-free issues and
> significantly scary behavior (downloading and silently executing
> binaries from the web on the user's behalf).
>
> If we're EOLing thunderbird on jessie entirely, that'd be one thing (and
> i'd be ok with it).  But EOLing enigmail on its own sounds like a route
> to trouble for enigmail users on jessie.

So looking back at this problem again...

I'm not sure we should remove *both* enigmail and thunderbird from
jessie. I understand there are problems with the a.m.o version, but then
that's somewhat outside of scope of LTS. It would seem rather unfair for
users of thunderbird that do *not* use enigmail to have their favorite
email client yanked away from them because a third-party plugin fails to
be maintainer correctly.

Right now I'm leaning towards completely dropping support from Enigmail
in jessie, since the changes required are too far ranging to be
comfortable.

But I could be convinced otherwise.

A.

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