On 04/05/15 02:47, David Hare wrote:
> On 03/05/15 21:24, Anto wrote:
>>
>> On 03/05/15 06:31, Edward Bartolo wrote:
>>> The command I used:
>>> debootstrap --arch amd64 jessie /mnt/sda8
>>> http://packages.devuan.org/merged
>>>
>>> /mnt/sda8 is the partition where Devuan was installed.
>>>
>>> I will now start testing Devuan.
>>
>> Hello Edward,
>>
>> I also tried the installation from that Devuan merged repository using
>> the same debootstrap command line options. The ones you used actually
>> also pull libsystemd0, systemd and systemd-sysv. Perhaps you expect less
>> restrictions on systemd components in Devuan.
>>
>> As for me, I think I have to wait a little bit longer until the Devuan
>> merged repository can provide more "cleaner" packages. I initially tried
>> to use the following debootstrap options.
>>
>> debootstrap --arch=amd64 --include
>> linux-image-amd64,grub-pc,locales,console-setup,ssh
>> --exclude=libsystemd0,systemd,systemd-sysv,init-system-helpers jessie
>> /tmp/sda1 http://packages.devuan.org/merged
>>
>> And I got below messages:
>>
>> W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted
>> up to five times.
>> W: See /tmp/sda1/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for details (possibly the
>> package openssh-server is at fault)
>>
>> The failure on openssh-server is due to the exclusion of
>> init-system-helpers because I don't get those messages when I removed
>> init-system-helpers from the exclusion list.
>>
>> When I didn't include ssh I got below messages, which is also due to the
>> exclusion of init-system-helpers.
>>
>> W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted
>> up to five times.
>> W: See /tmp/sda1/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for details (possibly the
>> package cron is at fault)
>>
>> When I had a look on the sources on that Devuan merged repository, I
>> didn't see init-system-helpers on the debian/control files of both
>> openssh-server and cron. Perhaps their dependencies are the ones which
>> require init-system-helpers.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Anto
>>
>
>
> Unfortunately (for the moment) you will need to enable 3rd-party repos
> to build a fully-functional system with a (xfxe4) DE:
>
> deb http://angband.pl/debian/ nosystemd main
> deb http://exegnulinux.net/nosystemd/ jessie main
>
> The sooner that is no longer necessary the better.
>
> You will also need to (immediately after debootstrap in a chroot):
>
> cat << EOF > /etc/apt/preferences.d/01systemd
>
> Package: *systemd*
> Pin: origin ""
> Pin-Priority: -1
>
> EOF
>
> cat << EOF > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01norecommends
>
> APT::Install-Recommends "0";
> APT::Install-Suggests "0";
>
> EOF
>
> else when you run apt-get in the chroot *systemd* *will* get it's
> claws in. The "recommends" only will make sure (xfce at least).
>
> I have tested this multiple times in recent days.
>
> Without that you may not be able to shutdown, reboot, suspend, handle
> removables...
>
> D
>

Thanks David,

I am quite aware of everything that you wrote. We discussed that on
another threads in this mailing list, didn't we?

What I was not aware of is that there is already a merged Devuan
repository. So I can pull packages from Devuan repository instead of
mixed ones, even a lot of packages are still coming from Debian. But I
think it is a good enough for me to have the baseline image for testing
purpose. For that, I removed init-system-helpers from my debootstrap
exclusion list to be able complete the installation. After that, I
purged init-system-helpers which forced me to remove cron, logrotate,
openssh-server, rsyslog, and ssh packages. I then dumped the whole
/dev/sda (8GB SATA SSD) into an image file as my initial Devuan testing
baseline. I think I need to buy a smaller SATA SSD to have the image
switching into/from the backup hard disk faster.

I am not a programmer, but I will try to have a look on source packages
of cron, logrotate, openssh-server, rsyslog, and ssh. Then I will try to
remove the soft-dependencies to systemd components, especially
init-system-helpers, and re-compile them. I don't have any experience at
all in Debian packaging. I usually just re-compile packages from Debian
source to match my OS environment. Maybe that would be useful for Devuan
if I could submit patches. If not, at least I will get the set of
packages that I want to have on my PC.

Cheers,

Anto