I am currently setting up a NAS / HTPC box using SnapRaid and MergeFS in combination for having a nice solution which is both flexible enough to store a large amount of media files, flexible enough to be extended by cheap hardware and being powered by free software.

i have experimented with Devuan a lot inside KVM machines since I am aiming to set up a dowse box in hardware soon but this is another topic.

My question so far:
I know that mergerfs is part of Debians standard repos:
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/mergerfs

As it seems it is not inside the standard repos of Devuan when I do an install straight from the ISO.

Is there a specific reason for this ?

I like Devuan being the platform for my new HTPC. I had to compile SnapRaid from scratch inside my Debian 9 x64 VM already.
So would I have to compile MergeFS as well in a Devuan installation as well ?

Removing SystemD should no mean reduction of available packages unless they are bound to systemd as well and require intense work to adapt to Devuan.

Having mergefs and snapraid available on Devuan would be a plus compared to Debian 9 :-)

Best regards,
Holger