I love FreeIPA and also non-systemd distros. Those don't usually combine very well, however.

I am intrigued by being a package maintainer. I've never had the privilege or responsibility before. Additionally, I know so extremely little about the debian-esque way packages are maintained. Also, I barely know how to build a dpkg. I come from the Fedora/rpm world where I've just started using the free, public build servers of COPR for myself.

Here's a question about the topic: would compiling an application without features [dependent on systemd] for devuan be permitted? Or do applications need to be basically the same as upstream? I'm not entirely sure what in python-libipa would depend on systemd, but if a feature doesn't fit my use case, I wouldn't care if I have to disable it. I don't know the first thing about [modern] programming, so I wouldn't be able to fix it. If it cannot be provided in the main repos as a crippled version if necessary, I certainly wouldn't be able to take it on.

After much Internet searching, I finally discovered 'python-ipalib' in https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/bannedpackages.txt. I assume, because the FreeIPA project is very Fedora-driven (the distro I used to use primarily), it has some kind of systemd hooks or some such.

Yes.  Exactly.

You could remove the systemd dependency and rebuild it.    Or better yet take on long-term maintenance of the package for Devuan.

However, now, I get an interesting error. After starting to explicitly name the packages that are missing, I finally got different output:

[root@ltb-010|/etc/apt]# apt-get install freeipa-client python-ipaclient python-ipalib
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package python-ipalib is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'python-ipalib' has no installation candidate

No installation candidate! I have not had this problem in the past on ceres (probably 2 months ago on a fresh install and it worked OK).

After much Internet searching, I finally discovered 'python-ipalib' in https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/bannedpackages.txt. I assume, because the FreeIPA project is very Fedora-driven (the distro I used to use primarily), it has some kind of systemd hooks or some such.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can setup my freeipa client on devuan ceres? Frankly, I'm not opposed to ascii or jessie; just the last time I evaluated it it was only in ceres in the first place. I'll get my wine stable from winehq, and any old version of Firefox is good enough for me.

If I need to make a dummy package that satisfies some arbitrary string dependency, I can do that. If I need another package listed from apt-cache search ipalib or libipa, I'm fine with that. Whatever it takes to get my domain logins, centralized sudoers, and optionally my centralized ssh host keys. If I have to manually configure sssd, cert trust, and ldap/kerberos, I can do that too, but obviously freeipa client does all that for you.