How to downgrade Icedove from 68 to 60?

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GNUser
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Hey everyone,

Today I had some updates available, one of them being Icedove. I was using Icedove 60, with Torbirdy addon, which is incompatible with Icedove 68. So, how do I downgrade to 60 (to the latest version available if possible) ?
And how do I prevent it from being upgraded? I still want to get updates if it's 60.xxxx but not 68.xxx

Thanks.

chaosmonk

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> I still want to get updates if it's 60.xxxx but not 68.xxx

There will be no more updates for 60.x. Thunderbird 60 is EOL.

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

I suspected as much.
But I still need to get to 60.x since I need Torbirdy to work and there is no chance to use it in 68.x
At least for now. Hopefully the TAILS team will be able to merge enough patches to upstream and things will be smoother in the future.
I was just mentioning that if for some chance some updates came along I would want them to be installed.

chaosmonk

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> But I still need to get to 60.x since I need Torbirdy to work and there is no chance to use it in 68.x

If you have not run "apt clean" you may still have the old version cached. Run

$ apt policy icedove

and see what versions are listed under "Version table:". If you see a 60.x version, you can install it with

$ sudo apt install icedove=

You can then use [apt pinning][1] to prevent Icedove from being upgraded again.

> But I still need to get to 60.x since I need Torbirdy to work and there is no chance to use it in 68.x

Why doesn't Torbirdy support 68.x? Thunderbird 68.0 was released 8 months ago, and Debian, on which TailsOS is based, replaced Thunderbird 60 with 68 a while ago.

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/162700/apt-pinning-package-versions

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31341

Thanks I will try that.
The link above explains the current situation for Torbirdy and 68.x
It might work in the future, but not anyone is able to solve it now.

Lucky for me, I always play things safe... The emails and RSS feeds I had, were all pointing to Onion services. At worst, my ISP DNS knows that I wanted to reach certain onion sites but not the specific pages I wanted to access (at least I hope so). AND the onion sites themselves didn't get my IP making a connection with user/password, so cannot disclose my identity.

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

It's no use, the same versions appear as they do in Synaptic.
Guess I could try downloading the deb file from Debian website, remove Icedove from my system and install it from the deb file... Dependencies are met already, so... Could work maybe...?

chaosmonk

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Debian no longer has 68.x binaries for x86 architectures.

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/thunderbird/

Maybe Mozilla has old releases of Thunderbird available for download, but after reading the issue you linked to, it sounds like your best options are to use Tails when you need to send an anonymous email, or to use JS-free webmail via Tor Browser.

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

To be honest I was using it mainly for RSS... I had an email account there but it was already available as a JS-free webmail (danwin1210.me, great webmail service, available as Onion too).
As for RSS reader, I thought the Torbirdy addon was the safest way to use RSS. Guess I will be back at square zero :(

Magic Banana

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Debian no longer has 68.x binaries for x86 architectures.
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/thunderbird/

I guess you meant 60.x. Anyhow, it looks like packages for both versions are available behind your link. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/thunderbird/icedove_60.9.0-1~deb9u1_all.deb for version 60.x.

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

Thank you!
I will, for now, stick with it. At some point will have to think about finding another RSS solution (one that works well with Onion Services, and has good privacy settings).

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

One question, if I install Icedove from that deb, Trisquel updater will not try to force 68.x version right?

Magic Banana

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I believe it will, unless you execute 'sudo apt install icedove=' to install it, as chaosmonk told you.

nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

First see whether the old version is still available in the repository.

Then you can try to freeze the version of certain packages using the package manager. However it is possible to cause dependency problem when upgrading other packages.

If you can't reinstall the old version, then try to contact the developers of the plugin to see whether they can update their plugin to support new versions.

GNUser
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I am running Trisquel 8, but in Synaptic the only options are 68, 52 and 45.
Why does Trisquel include older versions such as 45 and not have the version that was available just 2 days ago? :(

More to the point, how do I get the 60 version to install?
Thanks.