Comment 6 for bug 58144

I can see Martin's argument, but it misses the possibility that a package might stop being backportable from edgy to dapper at some point (either because the package changes to make backporting impossible, or because backporting is no longer desirable for some reason). In this case, the version in -backports would no longer be only minimally smaller than unstable, and it might make sense for a newer version to be uploaded to -updates.

It is also conceivable (perhaps not in Ubuntu, but elsewhere - it's a matter of distribution policy) that a distribution might decide that after a version has been tried out in -backports for a while it can be uploaded more "normally" to -updates.

However, I don't feel strongly about this, and we have no immediate use case where we want to supersede -backports with -updates. Allowing -backports to supersede -backports itself is clearly more urgent.