I've been running devuan ascii on my laptop for some time. Mainly it
works and upgrades without problems but libdbus-1-3 is stuck at
v1.8.something-devuan and libdbus-1-3 and other stuff needs 1.9.13 or
higher. It has been like that for some weeks - I assume that getting it
all working is giving the developers a lot of work to do!

xorg, vlc, pulseaudio etc on my system would upgrade if the right
versions of libdbus-1-3 and dbus were available.
After some thought I downloaded the dbus deb file from debian sid.

Bad move! My system is trashed again! Never mind, I can do a fresh install.

DaveT