Re: [Bug 323065] Thunderbird Backend

["Dan Nicholson" <dbn lists gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm new to the list and coming in late, but I wanted to make a comment
about invoking Thunderbird in reference to this conversation from
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2006-April/msg00077.html:

****

> When I wrote the search-ui patch I used "thunderbird" as command when starting
> thunderbird, this is probably the reason why you can't open any mails. I've
> changed this command to "thunderbird-bin" instead, which is more correct
> ("thunderbird" is a gentoo specific script I just found out).

I think it is "any distribution" specific. Here it is in Archlinux:
$ which thunderbird
/opt/mozilla/bin/thunderbird
$ locate thunderbird-bin
/opt/mozilla/lib/thunderbird-1.5/thunderbird-bin

"thunderbird-bin" is not in the $PATH, and is not supposed to be called
directly from command-line - only by "thunderbird" script, which sets
all necessary environment variables. I suppose "thunderbird" would be
the correct name.

****

I've built thunderbird from source many times.  Here's how things
work.  thunderbird is a shell script that lives somewhere in PATH. 
This is shipped in the tarball, but most of the distros fiddle with
it.  thunderbird calls $moz_libdir/run-mozilla.sh where $moz_libdir is
usually /usr/lib/thunderbird-1.5 or something like that.  This script
is very important because it sets up the environment to run
thunderbird-bin.  Particularly, it sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to $moz_libdir
since some of the .so's wouldn't be found without it.

run-mozilla.sh then invokes $moz_libdir/thunderbird-bin in the correct
environment with the necessary arguments.

You should be able to run the thunderbird script directly, passing
just the URI to it.  This was broken in 1.0.x, and the distros all use
different variants of the thunderbird shell script to work around it. 
In 1.5, this is fixed out of the box.  I don't believe you should be
invoking -remote in version 1.5.  This is now handled by
thunderbird-bin to determine if there is a process already running,
etc.  IIRC.  I will check later.

Anyway, I hope that helps.  For reference, you should be able to read
the thunderbird shell script.  It is fairly simple.

--
Dan