Hello Everybody,

I am not sure if this was due to a principle reason or ego, but I really
want to have a Debian-like OS that is free of any systemd and its
related packages. I just want to have a freedom to choose the packages
that I want to use, instead of being forced to use the one and only. So
I am preparing to switch my notebook and 2 of my Xen VPS' from Debian
into Devuan.

My notebook is currently running on Debian Jessie. It switched into
systemd sometime last year after I did dist-upgrade. When I tried to
roll that back, I ended up in dependencies hell. So I thought I keep it
while I am waiting for LMDE2. Sorry, I didn't know about Devuan until
about 2 months ago, hence the thought. But in any case, I don't have any
issue to clean install it later on.

I am more concerned with my 2 Xen VPS'. One of them is still running on
Debian Wheezy and the other one on Debian Jessie. As you know, even on
Debian Wheezy, some important packages are already locked into systemd,
e.g. dbus and udev. So I am thinking to downgrade them to Debian Squeeze
as my VPS providers still provide the image for that.

I will possibly have to recompile some of the packages to have the same
versions as the ones that I currently use. I just mainly need nginx,
php5 and sqlite3 packages. But I am not really sure yet what problems
will I get if I would recompile them in Debian Squeeze. Some required
libraries might be too old for the new versions.

So I really appreciate any advices to be able to smoothly upgrade my
VPS' to Devuan later on.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Kind regards,

Anto