This bug is why I have a love/hate relationship with Debian. This server runs unstable due to the fact that long, long ago I decided that unstable was stable enough and running unstable got me the latest packages so I wasn't a year or two out of date.
Since then things have been mostly stable... mostly. 99% of the time everything is just dandy. I update to the latest packages and everything goes great. The 1% of the time however, I'm completely fubar. Due to the aformentioned bug, mod_perl has been shut down on this box completely, pending new packages. It's stupid. It's also my fault for going with the unstable debian tree instead of stable or testing. However, with no easy access to the physical server anymore (ie: it's not sitting on my bedroom floor) and now a strong desire for server availability (with the tdi messageboard and it's rampant viewers ready to go for blood anytime the server goes down :), means that a re-install isn't really possible.
If anyone knows a safe way to go from unstable to say, testing, without screwing things up even more, I'd be interested in hearing it.
And yes, I will stop updating things that are working :\