Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proven it correct,
not tried it.

—Donald E. Knuth.

As long as you keep administering machines, you may have found that updating critical systems can be tedious if you do your job carefully: manually checking whether packages (either new or upgraded) have known issues which may affect your machines can be tedious and error prone. Fortunately there is some tools which automate such tests, and one of those is available for Debian and derived systems (in general I think it will work with nearly every APT-based distro out there): apt-listbugs. After installing the package, which is readily available from your Usual Sources™, the installed APT hook will check the package against the bug tracker for your distribution and ask you what to do in the presence of existing open bugs:

Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
serious bugs of python-babel (-> 0.9.1-5) 
 #493742 - Python namespace conflict with python-pybabel
Summary:
 python-babel(1 bug)
Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages? [Y/n/?/...]

You can tap ? at the prompt to see the list of available actions: you can stop installing, pin packages… If you also install reportbug you will be able of typing the bug number at the prompt to see bug details.

I hope this makes you life a little bit happier.