Would these work for ascii and/or beowulf, or will they need to be rebuild for each release?  I guess I could go ahead and try, but I thought I would ask first to save some time now and possible some breakage down the road.

Edit: Curiosity got the best of me so I had to give it a try.  I had previously removed the sury packages and replaced with debian php7.3-fpm and had everything working correctly.  So I then purged the debian php7.3* packages and then tried to install these packages in a beowulf (mini.iso dated 2-14-20) install which:

An uninstall and reinstall of openssl using apt did not help this issue, so I will leave it as it is here.  I just thought I would let someone else know if they were as curious as I am about this working.  If I did something wrong, feel free to let me know.

szutt,

I just checked my email and I found a message from sury and I think it was meant for you and not me.  With regards to the snippet you mentioned below,

ifeq (devuan,$(DPKG_VENDOR))
  ENABLE_SYSTEMD = no
endif

sury replied:

Can anyone instruct, or elaborate on how to do this?  I have never used the equivs package, or opentmpfiles package so right now I am lost.  But I will be glad to try any suggestions.  I do not see how this will work around the dependency of needing, and thus avoiding, the installation of systemd.  But then, I am asking for clarification.

Not to get too far off topic about migrating from buster to beowulf...

FSR >

You are correct.  I just removed the "hold" in apt and did an update.  It worked fine.  I did have one instance where an important file in NetworkManager was removed because it was "obsolete".  I replaced it and it works fine, so, for anyone reading this, backup the contents of /etc/NetworkManager before updating.  Better safe than sorry! 
The NM update worked fine in going from Beowulf to Ceres also.

Toxic >

I would recommend to install wicd instead of nm as a temporary solution.

I agree about Wicd, but I like using NetworkManager for the VPN gui.  It makes the vpn so easy to switch on and off.

Now back on topic...

I have been playing with this most of the day.  The instructions mentioned here still work, for the most part on a netinst install with no X system.  There may be a slight change, but it is still workable.  Commands were entered from a ssh session into the Vbox VM as much as possible.

I just successfully completed a migration from debian buster, it was not easy to do.  Since I really didn't know what I was doing, I  went by trial and error mostly.  I am sure there are other ways to do this, but this worked for me.  Hopefully, someone who knows more about this can shorten and simplify this migration from buster to beowulf.

I started with the debian v.10 netinst cd (with firmware) and then I installed xfce4 with

apt install xfce4

And I rebooted just so I could be starting from a fresh boot.

Edit:  Just today, Sept. 7, 2019, debian updated from 10.0 to 10.1 which brought in a new kernel and 60 upgraded packages.  I did a dist-upgrade and reboot to start from a 10.1 starting point.

Boot into "debian",   

apt update

apt install sysvinit-core

Do not reboot, yet.

# alter /root/.bashrc and add:

# logout from this ssh session and login to a new ssh session, this loads the new PATH

Installed devuan-keyring

wget wget http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/pool/main/d/devuan-keyring/devuan-keyring_2017.10.03_all.deb

dpkg -i devuan-keyring_2017.10.03_all.deb

Alter the sources.list to devuan, and then

apt update

apt upgrade

(I do not know what made me try this, as I was just going on a hunch and trying something else.  I was having a hard time getting sysvinit-core installed, especially from the devuan repos.  Once I installed it from the debian repos, and updated it from the devuan repos, within the same boot, it worked easier.)

# first reboot

reboot

(takes a long time to boot due to starting dbus.  It hangs for ~1-2 minutes

(takes longer to login to either the physical terminal or a ssh session, to both user and root account)

(does not boot to X session, only to terminal, but this was temporary)

apt install eudev

(takes a lot longer to "Process triggers for dbus", ~4 minutes, hangs at "Progress... 96%")
("Failed to open connection to "system" message bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.")

# network will not work unless you change interfaces file:
# alter /etc/network/interfaces file to change enp0s3 to:

# second reboot

reboot

apt install libelogind0

apt remove systemd* --purge

apt remove libnss-systemd --purge

apt remove dbus-user-session --purge

# lightdm was removed earlier, so:

apt install lightdm --no-install-recommends

# at this point, there was some kind of issue with libpolkit-agent-1-0, as it was the only package showing as upgradable:

# I noticed that policykit-1 was shown as a recommended package to lightdm, so

apt install policykit-1 --no-install-recommends

# and this updated the libpolkit-agent-1-0 package

# probably could have done this earlier, but I finally discarded the unnecessary stuff

apt autoremove

# third reboot

reboot

The end result:

# no systemd here!

# At the Xfce desktop, all logout options appear available and are not greyed out.

# On the Grub boot menu, it says Debian, and an "update-grub" does not fix it.

Link please?

Just to be clear did you change the permissions for all files in the operating system or just the files of the nextcloud install?  If you did, then I would suggest reinstalling the operating system.

What I do is to make the <user> the files owner and then set "www-data" as the group owner.  Then I add the <user> to the "www-data" group.  Finally, I change the chmod of the files to 0775 so that both the files owner and www-data group have read and write ability of the files.  To do this, I only have a single user system with no other user accounts. 

I would be interested in somebody else adding their input on a proper way to set the permissions in a multi-user system.  I have spent some time searching the web for similar information but what I have found mentioned is somewhat conflicting.  Some say to make the user "www-data" the owner of the files, but I am unsure about that.

fsr is looking out for your best interests by not giving you any instructions.  However, if you are seriously interested in this and don't mind ruining the Debian 10 install that you have, then I will provide you with a link that may, just may, help you out some.

Forum link

This was done on a minimal install with no X system, and I would change one command from this

to this,

Also, backup your debian 10 install before trying this.  You will be in untested territory here, so there may not be much help that even could be provided.  It will either work, or it won't.  Good Luck.

-niXer

On the last line I see /run/shm, but no /dev/shm

First, backup your data before you do anything so that you can get back to where you are now.

If you have been keeping your install up to date, then you may be surprised to know that there is nothing at all to do.  If not, then it may be a rather large update and it may be better to do it from a console outside of an X-desktop.  From the destop, press "Ctrl + Alt + F1" to get to a console.  When finished, press "Ctrl + Alt + F7" to return to the desktop screen.

I would make sure that your /etc/apt/sources.list file points to the correct repository address at deb.devuan.org, and then do an

  or 

then,

  or 

If everything works, and it probably will, you are good to go.  However, there may be some changes to a configuration file of a package between the beta. rc, and release versions.  This could cause a problem.

If you do have a problem, you could try to either uninstall the offending program ("apt remove <program> --purge") and then reinstall.    This could be tricky depending on dependencies, so use caution.  Another possible option would be to use "dpkg-reconfigure <program>" instead of --purge.  These two methods will rebuild the configuration file of a program.

If something breaks and it becomes unusable, then reinstall.  It is not that big of a deal, especially if you have your system (/home folder) backed up.  Refracta-tools is your friend here, along with rsync.  Again, backup your data before changing anything, especially if it will be a large update.

I have a feeling that you have been keeping your system up to date and then there is probably nothing that you need to do.  But I would make sure that the correct url address is present in the sources.list file and change this if needed.

Just to include a quick check to duplicate what haary, the original poster, is reporting.  I have a jessie server operational using the deb.devuan.org address in my sources.list which has not received any updates in a while and it too reports that

However, when I change the url in the sources.list file to "auto.mirror.devuan.org", it shows updates available:

So, the old "auto.mirror.devuan.org" address is showing updates available, while the newer "deb.devuan.org" is showing no updates available.  "https" in the url is not even involved here.

As an example using the program wget, which is shown as one of the programs that could be upgraded - with deb.devuan.org no upgrade is showing:

root@Am-VPN:/etc/apt# apt-cache policy wget
wget:
  Installed: 1.16-1+deb8u5
  Candidate: 1.16-1+deb8u5
  Version table:
 *** 1.16-1+deb8u5 0
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

However, using "auto.mirror.devuan.org", it does pick up the upgradeable program:

root@Am-VPN:/etc/apt# apt-cache policy wget
wget:
  Installed: 1.16-1+deb8u5
  Candidate: 1.16-1+deb8u6
  Version table:
     1.16-1+deb8u6 0
        500 http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/ jessie-security/main amd64 Packages
 *** 1.16-1+deb8u5 0
        500 http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

It appears that deb.devuan.org is not picking up the jessie-security updates section of the repo.  This is my sources.list.  I alternated between the two url addresses, of course.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ jessie main contrib non-free
#deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/ jessie main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ jessie-security main contrib non-free
#deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/ jessie-security main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free
#deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free

Actually, you may be are correct.  I did not notice that.  I think you are referring to the first "apt upgrade", yes that was while using systemd.  I thought that would only pull in the stuff that was not requiring systemd.  In total, there were only 10 or 12 packages pulled in.  I just had to find a good step by step so that apt could do it right.

fsr > In case you are interested, I will email you the note that I made of the steps and terminal output.  I finally got it to work one time and I did it again, step by step, to make sure that the steps were correct. 

I really was not expecting it to work at all.  Before this test, I also did a stretch to ascii migration and it was much easier.