UTC -0500  (East coast US)

OK, I read A.6 and if I read it again, I'm sure I'll get a headache.

I think we're screwed. As I see it, there should only be two options on this vote:
1. systemd only
2. some kind of support for other inits.

Then if 2 wins, figure out the details.

Oops! I gave you the option that goes with dpkg, not apt. Sorry about that.

You could try downloading the packages and installing with dpkg --force-downgrade -i <packages>.
Or maybe install an older package from /var/cache/apt/archives/

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. If you're ambitious, you could unpack the deb, add a 'set -x' to the preinst script(s) and then repack. That might give useful information.

Not sure if this is relevant, but I recently had trouble upgrading  eudev to a lower package version (220:something from when ascii was in testing to 3.2.2-something). I had to comment out a couple lines in /var/lib/dpkg/info/libeudev1:amd64.list and .md5sums to nullify a dependency that was getting in the way.

These two:
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1.6.3
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1

You can drop the country code altogether. It doesn't really do anything - you just get redirected to a nearby mirror. (e.g. I'm in the US and I frequently get Italian or German mirrors. There is no US mirror.)

If you want to use a specific mirror, choose one from the list here: https://devuan.org/get-devuan

fstab is excluded in the rsync copy when you make a snapshot.
fstab gets created when you install with refractainstaller. There's no entry for cdrom. I haven't needed that in years. If you do need it, I think you'd need to add a line of code to refractasnapshot.

Right, you can set up the boot menu before or when you make the snapshot.

If you set up the extra partitions in fstab with 'noauto,user' options, then you can mount/unmount by right-clicking on the mountpoint. I just tested this in jessie and it works. That's the version before the custom mount/unmount commands were added.

If xfe won't do what you want, take a look at spacefm or pcmanfm.

Your commands are correct for fuseiso and fusermount. I stopped using fuseiso a few years ago because it went away. I guess it's back, but I haven't tried it.

As root:

mount snapshot.iso /some/mountpoint
do stuff
umount /some/mountpoint

Why do you want to mount the isos?

I think FM81 was showing the mkisofs command as an example. You don't need to run that command - it's used to make the .iso file, not to put it on a usb.

You can make an iso that boots uefi or bios with refractasnapshot. See the config file. See the xorriso command in the script itself. There are a couple of options needed for uefi. If you have questions, we can talk about it in a separate thread.

NAME_OF_ISO would be the name of the .iso file you are creating. With just the file name and no path, it would be created in the current working directory. Add a path if you want it to land someplace else.

ISO_ROOT_OF_FILES is the top-level directory of the file tree you want to put inside the iso. Typically, it contains an isolinux directory and a live directory.

File the bug report against eudev.

If you're not going to be upgrading, you can delete the theme directories that you don't use. They're in /usr/share/themes.

Search for posts by Mr. Greenjeans in the Devuan Derivatives section. He's the most radical minimalist I can think of. That should give you some good ideas.

It's because I did something sneaky and you did something you don't remember.

1. There's no refractasnapshot-gui in ascii because yad uses gtk3 and some of the windows had their buttons off-screen. So I pulled it before the first release of ascii.

2. In beowulf/ceres I fixed refractasnapshot-gui so that you can see all the buttons in the windows. If you installed from the 2.1 desktop-live, you got a newer version of refractasnapshot-gui that's not in the ascii repo. (I slipped it in.)

3. If you didn't install from 2.1 desktop-live, then you got it from the same place you got refracta2usb, which is not in any devuan repo. (i.e. from my sourceforge site - https://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/ ) You can use the latest versions from sourceforge or download the beowulf or ceres packages and use them in ascii. Use same version of -base and -gui. (note: 10.2.6 through 10.2.9 are the same. We had to keep incrementing the version due to a bug in the build system that wouldn't let us build the same version twice.)

Yes, you must have the word 'persistence' in the boot command and the filesystem label on the persistent partition must also be 'persistence'.

You have enough space in the persistent partition to hold a big upgrade. As long as you boot with persistence when you make the snapshot, it will copy the upgraded (running) system.