fakechroot fakeroot /usr/sbin/debootstrap --variant=minbase ascii /target/directory

Using fakechroot seems to leave bad symlinks though so either skip fakechroot and obviously also fakeroot and run debootstrap as root or fix them afterwards with something like:

for LINK in $( find /target/directory -type l ); do
	LOCAL="$( readlink "$LINK" | sed "s|^/target/directory||" )"
	rm "$LINK"
	ln -s "$LOCAL" "$LINK"
done

Beware that iirc a system setup in this way doesn't have grub so you'd need to chroot to /target/directory after mount binding the usual directories and fix that.

Edit: Removed superflous $ in second code tag leftover from adjusted copy paste.

I will only a minimal installation and my installed Devuan jessie did crash as I did clean it (bad operation I did make) and I am really sad to use the Debian installer needing 1/2 hour or more in commando line. If I compare with Nutyx, the script installation of Nutyx is best to build a very minimal system and fast (is the common way of Nutyx to develope a new package in a chroot: you build so the chroot as extra dir in your system building it with the script equivalent from debootstrap but for LFS, precompiled as binaries by Nutyx and offered in a depository).

Puduan is able to start a subset from Devuan in Graphic  mode as a relatively recent Puppy linux. But I suppose it does not contain the Puduan debootstrap and it is possible it uses a Puppy linux bash instead of the Debian / Devuan.

I suppose it is possible to download both,  debootstrap and bash as well as the dependencies of  debootstrap (ar, I don't know if Puduan uses contains ar) and wget (is usually in each Puppy available)

- or are today more dependencies to take under consideration? -

and include them.

What are the actual commands to start the build of the new system in a supplementary dir?