1482801 - Greek dictionary incompatible with current release due to compatibility to version 3.x only

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[kgeorgokitsos]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.84 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to install Greek Spelling Dictionary through Thunderbird itself. It had disappeared after the last upgrade.


Actual results:

Error message (red) at the top:
Greek Spelling dictionary could not be installed because it is not compatible with Thunderbird 60.0

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for reporting this.
Presumably it would have been prevented by bug 1456988.
Similar issue reported in bug 1481900

Comment 2

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Cannot reproduce. This one installs file in TB 60 ESR:
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/greek-spellchecking-dictionary/

Comment 3

[kgeorgokitsos]

Restarted in safe mode, still unable to install. I did however find another dictionary that does install:
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/greek-spellchecker/

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I don't think we'll fix this in TB or Mozilla platform code. Someone really needs to lift the max version.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #4)
> I don't think we'll fix this

Won't fix what exactly?

I thought https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1456988#c45 resolved this, i.e. made dictionaries compatible by default.

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)
> Won't fix what exactly?
Total compatibility back to version 3.x from 2010.

> I thought https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1456988#c45 resolved
> this, i.e. made dictionaries compatible by default.
Exactly, we didn't get it quite right. There is still a preference extensions.minCompatibleAppVersion which has a a value of 5, so below that, nothing will be compatible, see bug 1506372 comment #6. So we're only compatible back to 2011.

We've already spent three people's time on this, Magus for development, Kris for review and mine for a complicated backport since add-on-wise the mozilla60 codebase is totally different.

I don't have any inclination to spend one minute more on this when someone with ATN rights can download the two *abandoned* dictionaries in question (Greek/Hebrew), edit their manifest and upload them again. That won't take more than ten minutes.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the explanation. I was looking for info we need to move forward, and that provides it.

> I don't have any inclination to spend one minute more on this when someone with ATN rights can download the two *abandoned* dictionaries in question (Greek/Hebrew), edit their manifest and upload them again. That won't take more than ten minutes.

Surely "two" is based in incomplete information...

And in spot checking 
* the top 10 languages from https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/tag/dictionary?sort=users?sort=users https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/hungarian-dictionary/ (plus greek) is incompatible
* the first ~15 alphabetically from https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/language-tools/ the following are incompatible - https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/afrikaans-spell-checker/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/albanian-dictionary/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/amharic-spell-checker/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/azerbaijani-spell-checker/

So in reality an estimated 20% of addons are incompatible. (could be higher, could be lower)  It also looks like very few compatible dictionaries were updated within the past 2-3 years, so bug 1456988, which you seem to imply was some arduous exercise, clearly was the right thing to do for our users.

That said, perhaps it ends here. Perhaps others will weigh in

Comment 8

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

The fix in bug 1456988 wasn't easy, but it was the right thing to do. Sadly we didn't get it 100% right. Given our release cycle, if we started now, we'd get a fix out in TB 60.4 in about a month. The quick fix is fixing the add-ons and making sure that someone responsible actually owns them. No updated since 2010 is basically unmaintained, which is not a good place to be.