Question about the two Firefox's in the backports

[BudBrain]

mozilla-firefox is a provided virtual package

Yes, I see. But it does not give me a smooth transition.
First "firefox" should be installed automagically through a dummy package "mozilla-firefox" depending on "firefox". The same for "firefox-dev" and so on.
Second when I try to install "firefox" manually I get the following:

rat@roadrunner:~$ LANG=C sudo apt-get -u --purge install firefox firefox-dev firefox-dom-inspector firefox-gnome-support
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libcairo1 libpixman1
Suggested packages:
latex-xft-fonts xprint
The following packages will be REMOVED:
devhelp* devhelp-book-autotools* devhelp-book-binutils* devhelp-book-cvs* devhelp-book-emacs* devhelp-book-gdb* devhelp-book-glibc* devhelp-book-gtk2*
devhelp-book-make* devhelp-book-sdl* devhelp-books* libdevhelp-1-0* mozilla-firefox* mozilla-firefox-dev* mozilla-firefox-dom-inspector*
mozilla-firefox-gnome-support*
The following NEW packages will be installed:
firefox firefox-dev firefox-dom-inspector firefox-gnome-support libcairo1 libpixman1
0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 16 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.6MB of archives.
After unpacking 12.2MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

I think the libdevhelp-1-0 is the cause of the trouble:

rat@roadrunner:~$ LANG=C apt-cache show libdevhelp-1-0
Package: libdevhelp-1-0
Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 220
Maintainer: Gustavo Noronha Silva <kov@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: devhelp
Version: 0.9.3-1ubuntu2
Replaces: devhelp (<< 0.9-5)
Depends: libart-2.0-2 (>= 2.3.16), libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.9.0), libbonobo2-0 (>= 2.8.0), libbonoboui2-0 (>= 2.5.4), libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.0-0pre6ubuntu4), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.9), libglade2-0 (>= 1:2.5.1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.6.0), libgnome2-0 (>= 2.8.0), libgnomecanvas2-0 (>= 2.6.0), libgnomeui-0 (>= 2.8.0), libgnomevfs2-0 (>= 2.9.90), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.6.0), libice6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0), liborbit2 (>= 1:2.12.0), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.8.0), libpopt0 (>= 1.7), libsm6 | xlibs (>> 4.1.0), libxml2 (>= 2.6.17), zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.1), mozilla-firefox (>= 0.10), devhelp-common (= 0.9.3-1ubuntu2)
Conflicts: devhelp (<< 0.8.1-1)
Filename: pool/main/d/devhelp/libdevhelp-1-0_0.9.3-1ubuntu2_i386.deb
Size: 68138
MD5sum: 8efd56b5226b1501b9edf71ce3c726e4
Description: Library providing documentation browser functionality
This library provides embedable widgets from the Devhelp program to
be integrated in tools like the Anjuta IDE for browsing API reference
documentation.
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

Guess, you would need a versioned "Provides: mozilla-firefox", if this is possible, or the already mentioned dummy package, which would also provide the automatic transition to "firefox". As there are such dummy packages in the directory already, I am wondering why they are not listed in Packages.gz.

I hope this was clear enough now

[BudBrain]

Today an dist-upgrade did a smooth transition with the 1.0.4-1ubuntu2~5.04ubp2 versions.

Thank you