I'm currently setting up a virtualbox image based on Devuan ASCII, for
eventual upload to azure as a base image for creating VMs.

I've hit some problems with the waagent package in the Devuan
repositories - basically they boil down to:

1) the python function platform.linux_distribution() returns "debian"
instead of "devuan"

2) waagent loads an instance of the class osutil which contain a set of
method overrides specific to a particular distro/release. However, it
doesn't have one for Devuan, so this, combined with (1) causes it to
load an osutil instance for debian, and this means that it expects
systemd functionality to be present.

I've fixed (2) on my local sandbox (created an osutil instance for
Devuan) and I'm preparing to do a fork/pull from github to get the
changes reviewed and hopefully integrated.

(1) is a bit of a problem. I can work around it by defining a
file /etc/lsb-release, which is seen and used by
platform.linux_distribution() - but I'm worried about making a
system-wide change to fix an application-specific problem: it could
break other things which rely on the python function returning "debian".
So I'm going to try to identify Devuan directly from within waagent,
rather than relying on python.

Any thoughts re. python identifying Devuan as "debian" would be welcome
- should this be flagged up as a bug, or is it necessary?