Warning: pinning ain't what it used to be. Stuff that's blocked on install is not necessarily (or maybe not at all) blocked on dist-upgrade. I've seen libsystemd0 come in like that on upgrading from jessie to ascii.

Do you know if there's a better way to prevent them from showing up?

Makes sense.  It isn't my primary system, so I'm not upset, but it is a little weird.

-I used the dist-upgrade command out of Debian habits, and I wonder if this is the culprit of my woes, because it installed dbus and slim; shame on me for not reading through the 800+ upgraded packages.  Also in this episode: dbus and slim are now pinned to never download.

You must use dist-upgrade or the equivalent (aptitude full-upgrade) to get to the next release. Warning: pinning ain't what it used to be. Stuff that's blocked on install is not necessarily (or maybe not at all) blocked on dist-upgrade. I've seen libsystemd0 come in like that on upgrading from jessie to ascii.

Yes, I experienced this on upgrades from lenny to squeeze to wheezy to jessie to ascii. I don't recall what happened from sarge to etch to lenny, but I'll bet it was similar.

I upgraded my devuan build host to ASCII today and wanted to document my experience for archaeologists who study our culture thousands of years from now.

-Upgrade took about 35 mins, give or take.  I'm excluding the time it took to run to the grocery store and back.  I don't use the default devuan desktop, only a simple dwm session, so I don't see a lot of the changes that other users might have.  I did notice that suckless-tools changed their default font sizes; dmenu is thicc.
-There were a surprising amount of packages to be autoremoved.  I think that was related to the next issue: that X wouldn't boot, which was weird, but it did after the second reboot, which was also weird.
-I used the dist-upgrade command out of Debian habits, and I wonder if this is the culprit of my woes, because it installed dbus and slim; shame on me for not reading through the 800+ upgraded packages.  Also in this episode: dbus and slim are now pinned to never download.
-It's using about 10-15mb more ram than jessie and I'm not really sure why.  This isn't an unreasonable amount, but it is noticeable.  Did anyone else experience this after they upgraded?
-Talks back.  The artificial intelligence that's built into ASCII's kernel makes some very sarcastic and inappropriate comments.  I had to mute my computer while company was over.

Other than that, it works just as fine as jessie, and I mean that as a compliment because I prefer stability.  Enjoy this screenshot.