Hi,

From: "Marjorie Roome via Dng" ; Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2026 3:46:29 PM:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 2026-06-20 at 07:55 -0500, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:
> > Greetings
> >
> > I use a separate system to do initial updates on before I do some on
> > my main system. A habit developed quite some time ago on advice
> > from a mentor.
> >
> > Did the usrmerge upgrade and then had an unusable system. Stopped
> > there.
> >
> > Have seen comments which seem to suggest that this usrmerge idea is
> > not really a good idea.
> >
> > So do I reinstall Daedalus on my testing system and not bother
> > upgrading to Excalibur waiting for perhaps an option where I don't
> > need to use usrmerge or do I do an install of Excalibur removing
> > Daedalus (which is not borked).
> >
> > Advice is sought - - - please?

> usrmerge originates in the underlying Debian development system and
> the Devuan devs decided that unmerged option wasn't saveable.  To
> update to Excalibur and any subsequently dist-upgrades (which are
> already in testing, there no going back on usrmerge) you will need to
> install usrmerge. This is not to say that usrmerge was intrinsically
> a good idea, and you may have seen comments here and elsewhere saying
> so. However it should be mostly harmless - I've applied it on 3
> systems now without any issues - but seemingly that has not been the
> case on your testing system. I would judge that what you need to do
> is find out why usrmerge is failing, sort that and then upgrade your
> testing system (and once that works your main system) to Excalibur.
> Perhaps easy said than done.   I assume you have cloned your testing
> system from your main system, which is presumably fully upgraded,
> checked that it works and then applied usrmerge?  What exactly
> happened when you did that, did it just freeze, or something else?
>
> --
> Marjorie

Does this help at all?
https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation/install-guides/excalibur/upgrade-to-excalibur.html

X.