On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 17:44 +0200, emninger@??? wrote:
> I was away from the keyboard a very long time (had to work
> outside/outdoor for a life), so very likely i missed a lot. Sorry in
> anticipation if i'm doubling something:
>
> One system is/was running devuan ascii quite nicely but when i came
> back i did an 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' and i
> realize(d), that openrc (which i was used to use) was removed. When i
> try to reinstall openrc, i see that nearly the complete system would
> be
> removed 

Which version did you have/are you trying to install?
>From the 0.21-2 debian changelog:
openrc (0.21-2) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Move Recommends init-system-helpers to Pre-Depend (Closes: 829488).
  * Drop Provides sysv-rc.
  * Install transit into /etc/init.d directly.

Maybe you have to install sys-rc before installing openrc?