A question I raised was left unanswered because the thread drifted into
other issues. So let me repose the question in an appropriately named
thread.

I'm doing a cross install of devuan Alpha 4 onto a newly partitioned
hard disk (/dev/sda1) in same box as my running Debian Wheezy system
(/dev/sdb1). I partitioned, formatted and mounted the needed new disk's
partitions; I downloaded debootstrap_1.0.75-1*.deb to a working
directory in my current sytem; I unpacked the data tarball, Finally I
ran the devuan debootstrap to install a base system on the target
drive.

  # debootstrap --no-check-gpg jessie /mnt/debinst   \
            http://packages.devuan.org/merged

Basically this went well, and in about 5-10 minutes I had the files for
a basic devuan system on the target drive. However, some hiccups along
the way:

  W: Couldn't download package mount (ver 2.26.2-6+devuan arch i386)
  ...
  W: Couldn't download package coreutils (ver 8.23-r arch i386)
  ...
  W: Retrying failed download of
     http://packages.devuan/org/merged/pool/DEBIAN/main/g/gnutls28/ \
     libgnutls-deb0028_3.3.8-6+debv8ud_i386.deb
  ...
  W: Couldn't download package insserv (ver 1.14.0-5 qrch i386)
  ...
  I: Validating libpam-modules 1.1.8-3.1+deb8u1+b1
  W: Retrying failed download of
     http://packages.devuan.org/merged/pool/DEBIAN/main/p/ \
     pam/libpam-modules_1.1.8-3.1+deb8u1+b1_i386.deb
  ...
  I: Retrieving startpar 0.59-3
  W: Couldn't download package startpar (ver 0.59-3 arch i386)
  ...
  I: Retrieving udev 215-17+deb8u4
  W: Couldn't download package udev (ver 215-17+deb8u4 arch i386)
  I: Retrieving tar 1.27.1-2+b1
  I: Validating tar 1.27.1-2+b1
  W: Retrying failed download of
     http://packages.devuan.org/merged/pool/DEBIAN/main/t/tar/ \
     tar_1.27.1-2+b1_i386.deb
  I: Retrieving tar 1.27.1-2+b1
  ...
  E: Couldn't download packages: mount coreutils insserv startpar udev

Why were these five packages not found? They are obviously critical.

When I go to https://packages.devuan.org/merged/, the pool directory is
empty. A puzzle. But I suppose none of this is relevant to my effort
next to chroot into the new system:

  # LANG=C.UTF-8 chroot /mnt/debinst /bin/bash
  /bin/bash: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version
           `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /bin/bash)
  /bin/bash: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version
           `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by
         /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5)
  /bin/bash: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version
           `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by
         /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5)

This seems to be a problem running chroot from my running machine and is
irrelevant to the lean devuan target I just installed. If so, failure to
download some packages is irrelevant to the chroot problem.

I gather glibc is part of libc. So do these errors indicate that the
libc version on my running machine is incompatible with its version of
chroot? I do:

$ ldd /bin/bash
...
libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7609000)

$ ldd /usr/sbin/chroot
...
libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7643000)

Haines Brown