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Incompatibilities: the Breaks Field
The Breaks field has an effect similar to that of the Conflicts field, but with a special meaning. It signals that the installation of a package will break another package (or particular versions of it). In general, this incompatibility between two packages is transitory and the Breaks relationship specifically refers to the incompatible versions.
When a package breaks an already installed package, dpkg will refuse to install it, and apt will try to resolve the problem by updating the package that would be broken to a newer version (which is assumed to be fixed and, thus, compatible again).
This type of situation may occur in the case of updates without backwards compatibility: this is the case if the new version no longer functions with the older version and causes a malfunction in another program without making special provisions. The Breaks field helps prevent these types of problems.