August 26, 2020

Thunderbird - downgrading Thunderbird

Thunderbird 68 is apparently the default and current version of Thunderbird that I get with Fedora 32. Thunderbird 68 has broken support for add-ons and takes no responsibility for this. For me, the keyconfig add-on is essential. I don't want mysterious things happening when I hit keys by accident.

I rummaged around on the internet and found: 

thunderbird-60.6.1-1.fc30.x86_64.rpm
The question now is how best to install this. I already have some version of Thunderbird 68 installed by default from the usual Fedora packages (I am running Fedora 32). I would like to install this and ensure that the normal update process does not automatically replace it.

This may actually be simple: 

dnf downgrade thunderbird-60.6.1-1.fc30.x86_64.rpm
This goes in without a hitch. To verify what version of Thunderbird I am running is not obvious. Click on the "hamburger" in the upper right, then Help, then "About Mozilla Thunderbird" gets the version infomation.

Disable updates

Edit the file /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and add this line to the end: 
exclude=thunderbird*
Then type "dnf update" to verify that it doesn't have any ideas about updating thunderbird.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org