For a couple weeks now, I’ve been having issues with Thunderbird 5 in my Arch Linux installation.
I have a few much-used extensions installed in my Thunderbird, and 5.x broke four of them when it updated in Arch from 3.1.11. I tried a few work-arounds. I tried to live without the extensions. This morning I decided that I just wasn’t going to deal with this any longer. I reverted. How’d I do that, you might be asking? Well, with Arch (in most instances), it’s pretty simple.
First item of importance is that I had a backup of my Thunderbird 3.1.11 .thunderbird directory backed up on separate media (DVD). Second item is that I had not run pacman -Scc in a while. This command clears the cache of installed items in Arch. So, with those items being satisfied, I was able to revert using the magical pacman -U command.
#pacman -U thunderbird-3.1.11*
The asterisk denotes auto-completion at the command line. BASH will automatically add the remaining characters to the command.
And with that simple series of commands, my world is back to being wonderful once again. Oh, and to make sure that I don’t accidentally upgrade T-bird on my next pacman update session, I’ve added it to the ignore list in my pacman.conf file.
#vim /etc/pacman.conf
# Pacman won’t upgrade packages listed in IgnorePkg and members of IgnoreGroup
IgnorePkg = thunderbird
There you have it. The wonderful simplicity of Arch package management.
Have fun… and learn something while you’re at it. 
~Eric
Great tip Eric, the more I use Arch the more I enjoy it.
Hi, Ian.
Yup. Ol’ Arch is pretty cool.
Nice post Eric!! Related: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages
Just a quickie. It was as much for my own benefit (so I can refer to it later) as it was to help others who may be having issues with T-bird 5 and other upgraded apps.