Yeah, I've been looking at this issue. The transition was done around 1.0.2-1.0.5, when Ubuntu didn't release any updates for several security vulnerabilities in Firefox. As a result, Backports team just pulled the latest Breezy package (which has undergone mozilla-firefox->firefox transitions), and had to re-create the mozilla-firefox transitional package because devhelper depended on a specific version of mozilla-firefox that just a virtual Provides: line could not satisfy. We certainly didn't rename package just because we felt like it :). With 1.0.7, Breezy has gone too far away from Hoary, and libcairo bindings no longer work when compiling Breezy 1.0.7 on Hoary. So, our options are: 1) Just use the aptitude process you described 2) Use Breezy 1.0.6 diff.gz's against 1.0.7 sources and create a 1.0.7 Backport 3) Work with the Firefox maintainer to remove 1.0.7's incompatible patches and compile a backport. 4) Get hoary-security packages to properly override hoary-backports Backports-style firefox packages are identical to what Breezy has, so the upgrade to Breezy has been confirmed time and time again to be working properly. It's the hoary-security packages that have introduced the weird unthinkable case. I personally perfer 4. A few Conflicts: lines would fix everything. <div>On 9/25/05, Martin Pitt <<a href="mailto:martin.pitt@ubuntu.com">martin.pitt@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi Andrew, hi backporters, hi James! Andrew Pam [2005-09-24 21:50 +1000]: > The USN-186-1 (mozilla, mozilla-firefox) updates are broken on Hoary: > > Preparing to replace mozilla-firefox 1.0.6-1ubuntu1~5.04ubp1 (using > .../mozilla-firefox_1.0.7-0ubuntu0.1_i386.deb) ... > Unpacking replacement mozilla-firefox ... > dpkg: error processing > /var/cache/apt/archives/mozilla-firefox_1.0.7-0ubuntu0.1_i386.deb > (--unpack): >  trying to overwrite `/var/lib/mozilla-firefox/extensions.d/00classic', > which is also in package firefox The security update is fine, the problem is that you use backports, which are screwed up in Hoary. They renamed the package "mozilla-firefox" to "firefox" without doing a proper transition, so you now ended up with having both packages installed, which is bogus. It would be best to remove firefox from hoary-backports entirely and just use hoary-security, IMHO. All hoary users with broken installations have to clean up manually:   sudo aptitude purge firefox   sudo apt-get install --reinstall mozilla-firefox should help. Backporters, if you want to fix this as well, you need to upload an empty transition firefox package which just depends on firefox. Thanks, Martin -- Martin Pitt        <a href="http://www.piware.de">http://www.piware.de</a> Ubuntu Developer   <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com"> http://www.ubuntu.com</a> Debian Developer   <a href="http://www.debian.org">http://www.debian.org</a> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDNq/3DecnbV4Fd/IRAp6fAKDHeiKES6rpNr2ytHQkzLwM+ciSQwCg/NKo UMPozqNHcr+EEA33lZ5slYA= =HBrJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- </blockquote></div>