dist-upgrade badly broken-XFree86

[Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org>]

I just rendered my system basically unusable doing an apt-get dist-upgrade.
I was aiming for woody; my system was potato + bits of woody.  The problem 
seems to be with XFree86; I was on 3.3.

I had debug logging enabled on apt-get, so I can provide gory details.  But 
here are the highlights:
Preparing to replace xbase-clients 3.3.6-11potato15 (using 
.../xbase-clients_4.0.2-1_i386.deb) ...
Note: Removing obsolete /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit directory.
Unpacking replacement xbase-clients ...
D000400: does_replace ... found old, version 0:3.3.2.3a-9
dpkg: error processing /usr/var/apt/archives/xbase-clients_4.0.2-1_i386.deb 
(--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config', which is also in package 
xserver-common
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)

Subsequent attempt to apt-get -f install or apt-get remove various packages 
fail because of dependency problems.

Any suggestions how to proceed?  And should I report this as a bug against 
apt-get, xfree, none, both?

Thanks.