I discovered this when I was removing thunderbird-locale-en-gb. It wanted to remove language-support-en and language-support-translations-en. I removed thunderbird-locale-en-gb anyway (also removing the language-support-en and language-support-translations-en packages). Then when I tried to reinstall the language-support packages, thunderbird-locale-en-gb got installed again!
I can't imagine why any of the language-support-* packages should be dependent on thunderbird-locale-*.
Confirmed.
Xubuntu 8.04.1
I discovered this when I was removing thunderbird- locale- en-gb. It wanted to remove language-support-en and language- support- translations- en. I removed thunderbird- locale- en-gb anyway (also removing the language-support-en and language- support- translations- en packages). Then when I tried to reinstall the language-support packages, thunderbird- locale- en-gb got installed again!
I can't imagine why any of the language-support-* packages should be dependent on thunderbird- locale- *.