*sigh* apologies for the length. It was not what I intended..
tldr: "Go devuan! Debian 8 pinning does not work for me"


I don't have the thread anymore, but there was something posted
within the past couple days which led me to this link -- I think
it was something Steve posted; something about a mailing list thread:

     http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/openrc-conversion.html

Someone on the linked thread made a lot of arguments about how
Devuan was "an operative overreaction" in response to Systemd;
about how the same thing could be done with Debian 8 and the apt
pinning workaround.

There are two reasons why this will never work, and the logistics
behind those two reasons are what makes the work being done on
Devuan all the more relevant:

1) Hacking up a distribution which has committed to a systemd
hinge-pin is a nice way to find yourself in a headlock someday.
You can pin all you want, and force-remove all you want, but
one day there will be a package you need (let's pretend it's
linux-libc-dev-xxx.x.x) which will have the hinge-pin baked-in. You
can no longer update libc. By consequence, you can no longer update
anything which depends on libc. Which is like everything.

2) Obviously, some packages are already at that point and already
have dependencies baked into some of the fundamental linux packages
everyone runs on Linux.

Devuan *is* relevant because any systemd bloat which makes it's way
into future packages can be delt with by the Devuan community. Which
is the fundamental idea Linux was built on. The same fundamental
idea which systemd adoption kills. Systemd is vendor lock-in and
there is no other way to explain it when "apache2-common" cannot
be installed due to libsystemd0 dependency.

I mention all this becuase I took the "deb 8" pinning challenge today
and it failed miserably. After following all the pinning directions,
and removing all systemd related software, my deb 8 system boots fine
on openrc, but I cannot use a2enmod as it requires apache2-common
which requires libsystemd0. uh whut??... I put the console session
on patsebin for brevity here: http://pastebin.com/raw/wZkuskuv

I have around 40 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machines in production. They
all need to be upgraded before April of 2017 when security patches
become deprecated. I don't know if Devuan will be 1.0 stable by
then but completely understand the complexity of the task at hand
considering the tentacular and insidious reach of systemd. Our
current plan is to go to 14.04 LTS where there is hopefully a
minimum of systemd invasion, but any hope for a "Debian" pinning
solution is certainly lost.

As anxious as I am to install Devuan on everything, my users would
not understand the decision to run beta software in production
when/if something goes wrong. Here's hoping for a Devuan 1.0 sometime
soon <crosses-fingers> and thanks go to those working hard to make
that happen. Do not let BS comments like "an operative overreaction"
discourage your efforts.