Pity to miss "man pages" which is the traditional Unix help system.

Fair enough. Yes, "minimal" is a relative while "basic" is a quality. As @SteveM vaguly indicated, "minmal" would mean that the thing is no greater in any comparison dimension than other of its kind. So I misunderstood your meaning.

Did you know that github is a Microsoft site?
And that there are many FOSS alternatives one can use instead?

So what do you mean with minimal?

👍 🤓

No reason whatsoever to discuss that here.

Yes, something is very odd. eudev is actually tagged as optional in the excalibur/main Packages file whereas it's tagged important in the ceres/main Packages file, and yet they have the same version code. Very odd but it does explain why it's not included in debootstrap.

Separately, I have a different note, that you might want to use binfmt_misc for "seamless" CPU emulation, in which case you can avoid the "foreign + second-stage" steps of debootstrap. The setup recepie on the build host for that would be like the following:

# apt-get install binfmt-support qemu-user-static
# modprobe binfmt_misc
# cat /usr/lib/binfmt.d/qemu-aarch64.conf > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

After that, your amd64(?) processor will execute arm64 binaries (within arm64 filesystem). I.e, it would let you run debootstrap in a single run, without the --foreign argument. Also, following the completed debootstrap, you may chroot into that filesystem (seamlessly) and run additional  apt-get install and whatnot, to complete the setup.

Either way you will need to add --include=eudev explicitly.

Ok, understood. Sounds good.

The very first thing to do in that init script is to mount /proc. Without that nothing else can be mounted. Possibly that is sufficient, but I think it should also mount /dev before any auto-mounting and mdev. Thus I suggest it starts as:

#!/bin/sh
mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t devtmpfs devtmpfs /dev
mount -T /fstab -a
....

Just to note that all that mounting happens within the initrd (unpacked filesystem) and switch_root will unmount all before switching root.

Therefore you might need to also add a bind-mount onto /mnt/proc just before switch_root

It is the right thing to exec the openRC init binary, though of course the root filesystem needs to be duly populated. If you want to rely on the early /dev population by mdev, then that switch_root init script might further need to bind-mount /mnt/dev as well before switching.

Hmm, the sysvinit scripts for eudev (or udev) seems to mount the kernel's devtmpfs onto /dev (of the post-pivot root filesystem), so apparently your system boot-up doesn't include those.

Could you share your kernel boot command line arguments?

The point is that initscripts installs an ifupdown networking  "event handler", /etc/network/if-up.d/mountnfs, that processes /etc/fstab when interfaces are brought up, and both the daedalus and ceres versions of network-manager link up to that by means of the indicated script,
/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/01-ifupdown.

The excalibur version however lacks that script.

Why do you want to use the command seatd-launch dwl.
Is seatd running already?
Is there a dwl running already?

Why shouting?

libncurses5 is found in daedalus/main.
Assuming you are now on excalibur, one option is to add the old repository sources to your sources.list, e.g., by adding the following lines:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security main

Then run

# apt-get upate aupdate
# apt-get install --no-install-recommends libncurses5

to get it installed (without including any "recommends" for it).

hth