Arch Linux

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,360

Sequoia-pgp and Thunderbird

There is a new development to link a significantly improved openPGP implementation that can be built into Thunderbird and make encryption and signing much better than the current internal libraries bases on rnp. There was an announcement at: https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2021/04/08 … underbird/

It would be superb if there was a build of Thunderbird for arch Linux and made available as a package in the arch repos - there are some significant disadvantages with the current builds from Thunderbird.net concerning openPGP. Using Octopus from Sequoia would be a huge leap forward. Sequoia is already a package in the arch community repos.

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Mike C

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,321

Re: Sequoia-pgp and Thunderbird

You could try it with the default build similar to https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia- … hunderbird
Just use NoExtract or NoUpgrade in pacman.con instead of dpkg-divert.

Maybe librnp could be packaged as a split package with thunderbird depending on it, then it would be easier to replace it.with another package.

Sequoia is already a package in the arch community repos.

That doesn't matter since octopus uses the rust crates directly, and not the c libraries.

Last edited by progandy (2021-04-09 12:14:57)

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mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,360

Re: Sequoia-pgp and Thunderbird

Yes I tried an octopus build and used a soft link for librnp as suggested in the upstream documentation - this worked nicely for the current stable version of Thunderbird - but the current beta (88.0b2) failed to work to either decode encrypted incoming mail, or to send outgoing signed or encrypted email because the key store is empty for the beta.  Reverting the softlink brought normal behaviour back for 88.0b2 and incoming mail had the correct padlock icons again and outgoing encryption was again possible since the keys in the key manager were present again. So anyone trying the technique for current stable Thunderbird (such as the arch main package) will find it works fine if you build the octopus package and link to the rnp library using a softlink.  I plan to add a report upstream to request patches so that the current beta will also work.  But this looks very positive and will give Thunderbird users a route to good openPGP support using the gpg key store outside of Thunderbird itself instead of relying on the internal keystore.

Some details are at:
https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia-octopus-librnp

Last edited by mcloaked (2021-04-09 16:01:01)

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Mike C