netbase upgrade wedged

[Max.Hyre@cardiopulmonarycorp.com]

   Gentlefolk:

   I'm upgrading a vanilla slink system (which itself has been
upgraded incrementally from hamm or bo over the years), using a
set of CDRs from www.lsl.com.  I've had no more than the normal
set of annoying glitches, but now I'm down to this one:  Trying
to upgrade netbase gets me an error message saying an error was
returned from the postinst script (error 30 maybe?), and I seem
to be un-netified.  Certainly ppp and some of its buddies refuse
to install due to netbase's absence.

   I've tried telling dpkg to spew all the debugging info I can
stand (?-D3777 maybe?), but while I get lots, at the penultimate
moment, it invokes the postinst, and _no debugging info shows up_
until the failure message.  I tried hacking netbase.postinst by
adding ``set -x'' so I could see what was up, but
	a) when using dpkg, it unpacks another, unhacked copy,
	   thus thwarting my scheme, and
	b) trying to run it myself it's obvious I have no idea
	   what the arguments should be.

   So...does anyone know what the hang-up is?  I've actually
read (gasp!) the upgrade documentation.  I note that netbase
has been split, but one of the resulting spawn is netbase, so I
presume (new) netbase still needs installing.

   If not an actual fix, can someone tell me how to get debug
info out of the postinst, so I can try to hack it myself?

   Thanks for any light you can shed on this.


				Best wishes,

					Max Hyre