Boruch Baum <boruch_baum@???> wrote:

> The bad news is that if this is the only step I take, "apt-get" will
> want to upgrade 1248 packages (it looks more impressive when I write it
> out . . One Thousand, Two Hundred and Forty Eight packages) with a
> download size of 608 Mb.


What if, instead of doing "apt-get [dist-]upgrade" you do "apt-get install reportbug" ? That will upgrade reportbug and only other packages that need an upgrade to satisfy dependencies.


Boruch Baum <boruch_baum@???> wrote:

> 3] Isn't it doing something quite unacceptable that it should never have
> been doing in the first place?

In an ideal world, yes. But bear in mind that a small bunch of people decided to do something practical about the cancer of systemd and fork Debian. Debian has been going for a loooong time, and has had a loooong time to get all the infrastructure into place.
Devuan had to start from scratch, work out a way to make a repository system work with split sources (most from Debian, some from Devuan), fix/replace those key packages that were "broken" by systemd but weren't really optional, organise hosting for everything, etc, etc. All the time, a lot of people we stood on the sidelines willing them to fail.
Against all this, this small bunch of people who are clearly much cleverer than I in these matters, made it happen.

There were a few rough edges, and probably will be for some time - lots of systemd to cure, too few volunteers to do it. Lets try and stay positive shall we ?