Hi Rainer,

I can only reply to your first question ATM:

Rainer Weikusat wrote on 04/08/2015 at 13:45 CEST:
> I'm looking for an upgrade path for a Debian wheezy installation I can't
> keep forever. I wouldn't mind some rough edges as I'm perfectly capable
> of fixing any bugs I could conceivably encounter myself but I'd prefer
> having a workable base to start from over "Linux From Scratch".

I just performed a dist-upgrade in a test VM from a fresh install
of wheezy (amd64) with the task "Webserver" and a LAMPhp stack
using this sources.list entry (and no others*):

    deb http://apt.devuan.org/merged stable main

First thing I did was

    ~# apt-get dist-upgrade

which resulted in a system that had systemd installed. :O)

This was fixed by executing

    ~# apt-get remove systemd

... et voilà. :-)

On this minimal installation I could also execute successfully:

    ~# apt-get remove libsystemd0

which results in

    ~# aptitude search '~i systemd'
    ~#

Finally I did

    ~# apt-get install devuan-baseconf

to have the relevant APT setup taken care automatically, but that
package currently has a bug ([1]), and I recommend not installing it;
because of a typo it creates a "/data" directory in root.

I admit, this is cleanroom stuff.

A notable "rough edge" was that download speeds of packages dropped
below 50kB/s after first few MBs.

Kind regards,
T.

Notes:
*) According to [2], "this APT source is exclusive and cannot coexist
    with Debian's repositories".

Links:
[1] Devuan Gitlab. Package "devuan-baseconf", Issue #14.
     URL: https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/devuan-baseconf/issues/14
[2] Devuan Homepage.
     URL: http://devuan.org/