I had to recently reconfigure my adsl connection and after having set it up with adsl-setup it didn't work. After some investigation I found a typo at line 102 of the script /sbin/adsl-connect: "the" should be "then". After having corrected it I can connect. Since I don't think to have ever touched that file before, I assume that the typo comes from the rp-pppoe package that I recently updated from rawhide.
Which version do you have installed? Have you tried 3.5-8?
It was 3.5-7. I just upgraded to 3.5-8 and adsl-connect seems to work fine. This is what I call fast bug fixing! Thanks! (I'm closing the bug and marking it FIXED, is ok or I'm not supposed to do it?)