# Where did Thunderbird go?



## jayveesea (Jul 11, 2015)

I just did an upgrade (running FreeBSD 10.1), and now I have found that Thunderbird has been removed from my system and there is no more Thunderbird pkg!

Any ideas why it is gone?  I see that the Linux version is still avilable, but I don't really want to run that.

Thanks,
-j


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## junovitch@ (Jul 11, 2015)

I noticed the other day that there was a build issue with Firefox. It appears there was a build issue with Thunderbird as well.

Portsmon URL:
http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/portoverview.py?category=mail&portname=thunderbird
http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/portoverview.py?category=www&portname=firefox

For the time being, you'll have to use ports to install the software if you need it right away.  Otherwise wait a couple days and try again as the maintainer addresses the issue and a new package gets built.  You can keep an eye on the Portsmon site above to see the result of the latest builds.


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## protocelt (Jul 11, 2015)

I really think this is a bug in pkg(8) though. IMO, an installed package shouldn't be removed during an update if no new package exists in the repo. To be honest I don't know if this is the default behavior of pkg(8), but if it is, yikes.


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## jayveesea (Jul 11, 2015)

Thanks for the help and quick replies!  I can wait it out.


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## junovitch@ (Jul 12, 2015)

protocelt said:


> I really think this is a bug in pkg(8) though. IMO, an installed package shouldn't be removed during an update if no new package exists in the repo. To be honest I don't know if this is the default behavior of pkg(8), but if it is, yikes.



pkg(8) takes an aggressive stance to ensure everything is consistent.  If it needs to update something that was likely a dependency of Firefox but as in this case Firefox was unavailable, it will end up removing Firefox since it can't keep the dependencies in a consistent state.  If anything, always keep an eye on what it says it will do during the upgrade and say no if you don't agree with what it is about to install or remove.


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## kpa (Jul 12, 2015)

junovitch said:


> pkg(8) takes an aggressive stance to ensure everything is consistent.  If it needs to update something that was likely a dependency of Firefox but as in this case Firefox was unavailable, it will end up removing Firefox since it can't keep the dependencies in a consistent state.  If anything, always keep an eye on what it says it will do during the upgrade and say no if you don't agree with what it is about to install or remove.



This holds for ports that are required by other ports but Firefox is a "leaf" port and not required by anything else. I highly doubt that the removal was a result of dependency conflict but something else. Specifically I've never seen a leaf port removed by `pkg upgrade` when it wasn't available in the remote repository for whatever reason.


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## protocelt (Jul 12, 2015)

If this is the case, hopefully pkg(8) can grow to be more flexible with this in the near future. On a desktop this isn't so much of an issue but on an internet facing server the user is essentially given an all or nothing choice in regards to updating forcing the use of ports to keep any package containing a vulnerability up to date. If you really know what your doing there are ways around this such as locking a package and such however I think it would be agreed that this is generally is a bad idea. I do say this with a limited understanding of pkg(8) and the understanding as well that dependency tracking can be a complex issue for any package manager regardless of platform.


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## junovitch@ (Jul 12, 2015)

kpa said:


> This holds for ports that are required by other ports but Firefox is a "leaf" port and not required by anything else. I highly doubt that the removal was a result of dependency conflict but something else. Specifically I've never seen a leaf port removed by `pkg upgrade` when it wasn't available in the remote repository for whatever reason.


Thanks kpa.  What I was going for is if on of Firefox's dependencies needed to be updated and if that would have resulted in a reinstall of Firefox due to a shared library change that it could have resulted in this.  My word choice wasn't very clear.


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