Reproduced the failure(s) in the simple testcase using the source tarball (duplicity-0.6.16.tar.gz) on Fedora 13 i686, so the problem doesn't seem to be specific to the PPA version (0.6.16-0ubuntu0ppa6~lucid1).
Also, as 0.6.16 fails even with backups created by itself, it doesn't seem like this is caused by a buggy old version producing invalid backup chains.
Reproduced the failure(s) in the simple testcase using the source tarball (duplicity- 0.6.16. tar.gz) on Fedora 13 i686, so the problem doesn't seem to be specific to the PPA version (0.6.16- 0ubuntu0ppa6~ lucid1) .
Also, as 0.6.16 fails even with backups created by itself, it doesn't seem like this is caused by a buggy old version producing invalid backup chains.