I have little knowledge or experience when it comes to VMs.  I would much rather spend my time on numerical methods.  But, when you are the only programming savvy person on projects, you often have to dabble in other things.  Long ago when I first started with Debian, I had to port token ring drivers so that my Linux boxen could talk to all the NT computers everyone else had.

Well, I have chores outside to do.  Thanks for the options.  Next time we have some weather moving in, I will explore some more.

I can't remeber how virtualbox works right now BUT :

If the use case is not about (emulating) architecture foreign to your systems  uname -m
try:
lxc  Linux Containers userspace tools

Its access to containers (like docker) but without the
corporate buy in ==> systemd etc

It pre-dates docker BTW.
I used to use that system for industrial strength
virtuals in my work. (with their own networks LAN and Public)

There is an entire suite of commandline tools
and *templates*,
which are not hard to bend into something else.

lxc + debootstrap  = almost anything linux you want.

People run ubuntu under debian and other "interesting" things.

They even work on RapberryPIs

Though sure, you _would_ want to be tight about that.

Think a chroot / jail  with its own network stack and process isolations.
Its more or less endless.

Then again you may know all this and have run screaming away in the past

Worth a thought though.
Not nearly so versions dependant.
2.8+ from my memory and most generic kernels will auto mount the namespaces etc.
(pfft when I was a boy ...)

Yes, I did know that Devuan has a vagrant image (Jessie).  I was hoping to be lazy and find a Ceres image.

But, going back to a Debian machine which had excess disk space, the 4.7 kernel which could do virtualbox is broken, and the upgrade to 4.9 kernels breaks the virtualbox that is available to jessie or jessie-backports.

Pitty, we have thunderstorms moving through the area, which came knock out networking.  I was hoping to work on guayadeque for a bit.

Bah humbug!  :-)

Be careful if you take a long time to write a post.  Sometimes posts go 'missing' when it's time to post if you're not cookied with the 'stay logged in' option.

Probably good to know-mentioned by Golinux in a different post. Not sure if it applies here.

Different approach.  I don't know that Vagrant is the preferred approach to virtual machines on Devuan, I suspect it is.  I know I would shy away from Docker based on systemd.

To compile a source package on Debian, there is magic to install all the necessary packages to successfully compile the package.  Devuan has packages that are of lesser interest, and so a person wants to install all the packages except some list.  Systemd and dbus seem to be the front runners, there may be others.

Is there a tool (or something) which will populate a VM with packages, except for some?

If a person builds a package for Devuan (with constraints) and it works, is there a way to save this knowledge to Devuan?

Documentation on how to find dependent code to remove, to help in this?