Betterbird .deb?

[MintHawk]

Hello, everyone.
Would it be possible to create a .deb for the Betterbird mail client?
I can only find compressed tarballs and via Flatpak the links in the emails are not clickable.
Thank you.

[Stevo]

There's two possibilities. One is quicker and easier, and just involves wrapping their already built Linux binary in a deb, like we already do for Mozilla's Firefox binaries. But this makes it limited to amd64 64-bit platforms only (admittedly the majority).

The other would take much longer. Since Betterbird consists of a set of patches to the Thunderbird source https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/tags,
it might be possible to rebuild Debian's source with those patches to create packages for all our architectures.

[MintHawk]

You 're the experts. I'm sure you will do your best, as always.
Thank you.

[MintHawk]

After not neing able to have my contacts automatically appear as I type the name of the recipient, and after trying to install various add-ons that did not work,
I switched to Evolution. I dodn't know...It seems that Betterbird is made for Windows. There are issues that have yet to be resolved in Linux...

[rambo919]

Any possible movement on this? Wait for the next MX?

Using it from the flatpak "kinda" works but attatchments could become a bother at some point and birdtray (even the unverified flatpak version) cannot for some reason browse in /home/user/.var/ so it cannot monitor the inboxes.

The reason for birdtray is while the system tray works the new mail indicator does not....

[Stevo]

What about trying the prebuilt binary (64-bit only) inside the "Linux Archive" links here?

https://www.betterbird.eu/downloads/index.php

Our MX Firefox equivalent doesn't have any problems with extensions.

[RedGreen925]

What about trying the prebuilt binary (64-bit only) inside the "Linux Archive" links here?

https://www.betterbird.eu/downloads/index.php

Our MX Firefox equivalent doesn't have any problems with extensions.

That works perfectly fine I have used it for a while. I put it in my home bin directory the .desktop file in the .local/share/applications works great. Now I check just over a year of use after switching from thunderbird a totally seamless process it uses the same directory with all of its settings. For every update downloaded you just need to move the extracted betterbird directory to replace the current one. After of course having shutdown the program first. If the OP wants to use it the desktop file I created for it just needs the changing of path to the one he will use.

Code: Select all

zeus@9600k:~$ cat .local/share/applications/betterbird.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=Betterbird
Categories=Network;Email;News;Office;
MimeType=message/rfc822;x-scheme-handler/mailto;text/calendar;text/x-vcard;
Exec=/home/zeus/bin/betterbird/betterbird-bin
Icon=/home/zeus/bin/betterbird/chrome/icons/default/default256.png

[rambo919]

OK when fooling around with the binary package.... I noticed I made a mistake based on the assumption that because it's a flatpak it will have it's own profiles folder.

Both binary and flatpak version also uses the default Thunderbird profile location they just duplicate the imported profiles. Birdtray does however work best with the binary package I think.

[Artim]

I realize using the binary probably won't update. Right now I have the Flatpak installed (my first time ever using Flatpak) and I'm curious about the binary:

1. - If I uninstall the Flatpak and unpack the tarball, will it retain the info because of the ~Thunderbird folder created by the Flatpak?

2. - If the MX Team ever actually packages Betterbird for MX, would I have to reinstall it (which would be fine and better anyway). And

3. - Is unpacking a tarball that big of a deal to do? I'm betting MX already has all the cool tools to do that with.

[Stevo]

You should be able to right-click a tarball and choose to extract it in Thunar or Dolphin, If you're using another file manager, you might need to set it up manually.

An MX betterbird-bin package would update automatically, but you know...mo' packages, mo' problems, and less time for our limited volunteer packaging team.