thunderbird fc7-fc9 preupgrade-upgrade problem

[burnie]

After using preupgrade to faciliate an upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9, then executing several yum updates, I find myself in a loop with updates required for both thunderbird-2.0.0.14-1.fc9 AND thunderbird-2.0.0.14-1.fc7. The "Update System" panel says I have an update type, with Version ...fc9 and Updates: ...fc7 (repository fedora). yum info says .fc7 is installed and .fc9 is available; however I have upgraded three times and the .fc7 remains installed with .fc9 available. I have scanned bugzilla for a related bug report and found nothing.

One obvious thing to do is yum remove thunderbird followed by yum install thunderbird. However, I am unclear about four things. First, will this for sure install the .fc9 version? Second, will this for sure not destroy my (voluminous) email files? Third, will I get out of this strange loop? Fourth, does this warrant a bug report (I kind of don't think so)?

[nachor13]

Probably I had similar problem when upgrading from F8 to F9. I wasn't able to update Thunderbird using yum though I tried many times.
As I remember, the cause was a problem with old version of Thunderbird spell checker. During update, yum couldn't remove the spell checker directory located at /usr/lib64/thunderbird-2.0.0.xx/dictionaries/. I found error message somewhere in system logs (I don't remember where).
I simply manually removed this directory (including its contents), then yum updated Thunderbird correctly.

Regards, Eryk

[burnie]

Thanks much, Eryk -- it worked for me as well. However, it appears my guess that no bug report was warranted appears to have been wrong. While I didn't find Bug 446351 before -- searching for "preupgrade thunderbird" and "thunderbird preupgrade" produces "Zarro Boogs" -- it has been filed already. A better fix is apparently (per aforesaid bug report) to rename the dictionaries directory and then maybe update those pointed to by the symlink that gets set by the preupgrade process in the event that you've personalized your copies.

[nachor13]

Yes, you are right, a fix included in bug #446351 is better. I have to confess that, in this case, I didn't try to look for the help - first I tried to solve the problem myself (and I succeed).