No, I went through a different mess. 14GB is not big enough. During the upgrade, there were points when free space got down to 130MB. Um, no. There was a point where it got to zero. I was able to manually delete packages in /var/cache/apt/archives to make enough space to run some other commands, like 'apt-get remove libreoffice'.

Also, the upgrade took 12 hours. (OK, I slept through most of that, so it might have been shorter..)
I would recommend getting rid of mate before you upgrade. It will be messy. I installed openbox, lxpanel and lxterminal before removing mate, and I still had to reinstall xorg, xinit, xserver-xorg-video-all after removing mate.

A couple of things are broken. I have to type 'disable' during bootup. I get messages about some parrot-specific package needing attention as user, not root (inet-something). And I would guess that some other special parrot sauce is broken, too.

Anyway, once I finished the dist-upgrade, I also did an 'apt-get autoremove' and also removed systemd. I lost lightdm in the whole process, but startx works.

You should be able to have both elogind and consolekit installed. Which one is used is determined by which backend is installed. What happens (after fixing broken) if you try to install
libpolkit-backend-consolekit-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0

I think those will satisfy the deps so it won't ask for libpolkit-gobject-1-0-systemd

I can try this today. (Install lxde and then upgrade)

I'd try aptitude why lxde and the same with the other packages that it wants to remove. Find out what brought them in. It's probably being replaced. And it's probably related to the new versions of elogind and/or policykit-1 that were put in ascii earlier today.

You're the second one today with something like this. (Looks like a metapackage issue.)

That list of packages for autoremoval looks like stuff that came in with whatever task-*-desktop package was installed in your system. And I stress the "was" part of that. Past tense. Reinstall the one that's appropriate for your desktop environment. Did you remove something recently?

Now that I think about it, unattended upgrades on a testing system might not be the best choice.

Check the Makefile to see if there's a place to set that path so it corresponds to your own setup.

Nope. Refractainstaller is not devuan's default installer. We were talking about the debian-installer (that's the name of the package) which installs packages either from online repositories or from the media. Refractainstaller is used in the devuan live isos, but it doesn't install any packages - it just copies the running live system to the hard disk.

I handle wireless firmware in Refracta by including  the packages in the iso. There no possibility of accidentally installing them - they must be installed manually with dpkg or gdebi.

You're probably referring to the following that I said in another thread:

I was referring to difficulty working with the code to modify it. The devuan installer works surprisingly well. I don't think the rate of bugs in the beta installer is much different from what I've seen in debian over the years.

I'm not working on the installer other than to test it. Any time I've tried to include it in a live iso (with live-build) I failed. I hate the damned thing and don't know why you want to use it, but I respect your preference in installers (and we intend to keep it working, so don't worry about that.) I know more about the installer in the live isos.

I also said:

We're working on that. Testing installers takes time.

Here are my results. amd64 in all cases. (also posted to devuan-dev mailing list)

Install and Graphical Install (beta netinstall iso and dvd):

  installer does not ask about non-free packages.
  selecting eth0 results in no non-free firmware installed
  selecting wlan0 installs non-free wireless firmware

Expert Install and Expert Graphical Install (only tested dvd):

  If you select a mirror, you get asked about non-free packages.
  Without a mirror, you do not get asked about non-free.

***  Without a mirror, non-free firmware gets installed regardless of
whether eth0 or wlan0 was configured.

*** With a mirror, wlan0 configured, answer "NO" to the non-free question,
and non-free firmware gets installed anyway.

Note: the sources.list issue seems to be fixed in yesterday's mini.iso.

Miyo,

I don't know. There could be differences in the server hardware, the network paths or the current load on the server. Try running a traceroute on the different repos to compare times. And also notice that us.mirror takes you out of the US. (Boston to Chicago to Canada to France for me.)

Ascii is still in testing, but it pulls packages from stretch, which is stable. Current debian testing is being tracked by devuan beowulf, but not a lot of work has been done on that yet. I've heard from a couple people that beowulf is running well. I did one upgrade from ascii to beowulf, and it was pretty smooth, but I didn't keep that installation.

linux-image-4.15 can be found in ascii-backports. Add the backports repo, update, then install the kernel, then comment out backports and update again. (or pin backports to a priority lower than 500. This isn't strictly necessary, but it protects you against any mishaps with the priorities set in the repos. I got burned once.)

apt-get -t ascii-backports install linux-base linux-image-4.15-<whatever>

auto.mirror, us.mirror, XX.mirror are all mirroring packages.devuan.org, which uses the first incarnation of amprolla to merge the debian and devuan repos. It updates once a day.
pkgmaster.devuan.org uses amprolla3, which updates every couple of hours and is mirrored by deb.devuan.org.

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii-updates main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii-security main

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports main

Normally, dpkg will ask you what you want to do when it detects a config file that's been altered from the default. My understanding is that the *.d directories are there for the local admin to add custom configs that won't be touched by dpkg. I guess that understanding is not correct or complete. Maybe put it in a file named myfsckingblacklist.conf and see if that works.

1) You can mount an installer iso and look in /firmware to see what packages are there. I think it's just wireless firmware so people who only have wireless can install.

2) There is no devuan kernel. It's the debian kernel, unchanged.

3.) What proprietary software was installed on your system? I don't get any in my installs unless I tell the installer to use my wireless interface.
You can run the following command to check:

dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Package}\t${Section}\n' |grep -e non-free -e contrib

or

    aptitude search ~i~s"non-free~|contrib"
or
    aptitude search ~i~snon-free ~i~scontrib

or else install vrms and run it.

2) (The first "2"): non-free in sources.list is a bug that has been fixed. You can check that at git.devuan.org if you need to confirm it.