Thunderbird bz 579023 still not fixed even though there is an upstream fix available

[Kevin Kofler]

Tom Lane wrote:
> Wouldn't it be sensible to approach the Mozilla folk about getting them
> to relax their requirements so that sane packaging is possible?  ISTM
> that this must be a problem for other distros too.

We have tried, Debian has tried, other distros have tried, Mozilla just said 
"no". The problem is that, unlike most other upstreams, Mozilla does not see 
even a coalition of all GNU/Linux distros as an almighty power you have to 
give its way, but only as a secondary platform next to Window$ from whose 
users they get millions of downloads. So they feel they're in the position 
of power and get to dictate to us what we have to do.

They also care very little about the needs of distros and it took years for 
some of the system libs to get used rather than bundled, for things like 
system icons getting adopted etc. They still suck in the system integration 
domain in many ways, e.g. openSUSE's KDE integration patches have yet to be 
merged, and of course our maintainers refuse to merge openSUSE's patches due 
to the usual trademark concerns (which openSUSE doesn't seem to be concerned 
about, they just ship those patches in branded packages, so either Mozilla 
approved them, which means we can ship them too, or they just didn't care, 
so why should we?).

        Kevin Kofler