I think:

- Devuan should add libsystemd0 and systemd packages to devuan-baseconf
to exclude their appearance on one's system;
- Devuan's first focus is stable, thus testing and unstable users
should be able to solve packaging problems, which includes
pinning and even forking packages (which should be followed by
pushing newly forked packages to repository so others won't be
in need to create their own all the time);
- you shouldn't use testing and unstable in production not because the latest
software is less stable but because updates are too frequent and
unwanted dependencies can be added.

There is not much can break, packages dependent on what you have pinned,
won't be upgraded. For example, I've pinned libsystemd0 (let's say,
added to "unwanted packages" list), so gvfs won't upgrade. Or
another example, today I updated repos and saw "aha, rpcbind now needs
libsystemd0, okay, let it be not the latest version". It won't upgrade.
Of course I have an option to download the source and remove libsystemd0
dependency, but, as I pointed out, I am not the only who uses unstable
(I hope) and there should be people who solve such problems. But, as I said,
the most important is to get stable to work. Stable doesn't have as frequent
updates as testing and unstable.

I didn't use (and still don't) dist-upgrade.

Also, packages that can't be upgraded are always shown as "kept back".

And there is a solution to use angband repos (angband.pl)
if you use unstable.


Hope this helps,

Mitt


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


On Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11:15 AM, Simon Hobson <linux@???> wrote:
Mitt Green <mitt_green@???> wrote:

> But I also have libsystemd0 file in /etc/apt/preferences.d containing:
>
> --------------------
>
> Package: libsystemd0
> Pin: origin ""
> Pin-Priority: -1
>
> --------------------

Does anyone have any tips for getting more meaningful output from apt when something fails ?
Specifically, not long ago I pinned systemd out like that and tried a dist-upgrade to Debian Jessie to see what would happen. It took some time (and trial and error) to figure out which package was blocking it since apt seems to baulk at something that depends on something that depends on something else that is blocked - making it hard to figure out what that something else actually is.

In my case, turned out to be clamd causing the problem.


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