>Many years ago, on this mailing list, one of the VUAs mentioned that
>the long term plan was to leave Debian behind and become the Devuan
>independent distro.

I am sorry to burst the soap bubble, I want Devuan to persist and that requires a realistic analysis. Cleaning up systemd dependencies to Debian packaging is child's play compared to creating and maintaining a large self-built distro in the long run. The idea of an independent Devuan not based on Debian may be the imaginary fantasy of some people (not me), but it is unrealistic. Creating, but more importantly maintaining, a medium or large distro over the years is a huge job. Debian is around 1500 maintainers and it is noticeable that more person-hours would be needed to maintain it (delays in packaging new versions, delays in attending to bug reports, ...). Devuan has 1/100 that number of maintainers, and its human capacity is limited to hardly achieve to modify a small number of packages of each Debian release (task that is delayed months). For experiments there are already other distros, like Hyperbola. If the name of Devuan ended up deriving to a Hyperbola type distro, it would be necessary to remake a new Devuan in the original (current) sense: based on the veteran and stable distro that Debian is but removing the systemd dependencies.

Best regards!