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brocashelm

Member

Registered: 2020-06-29

Posts: 114  

Mixing Devuan Ceres with Siduction?

I recently became aware of Siduction, which is essentially Debian Sid shipped with additional repositories meant to complement its stability. Since I already use Devuan Ceres, I was wondering what it would be like to use Siduction's exclusive repositories. There are extra settings for MATE, Xfce, LXQt, and Cinnamon desktops, as well as Siduction defaults for Apt. Another plus is you can get slightly newer kernels (current version is linux-headers-5.10.17-towo.1-siduction-amd64) than Devuan or Debian (if I recall correctly).

Finally, here are Siduction's official repositories, if anyone is curious about experimenting (their keyring package is siduction-archive-keyring):

deb http://packages.siduction.org/extra unstable main
deb http://packages.siduction.org/fixes unstable main contrib non-free

I know it's a distro that ships with Systemd (because of Debian upstream), but I don't believe that these two repositories depend on it. Anyone with more experience using the distro is more than welcome to set the facts straight.

dice

Member

Registered: 2020-11-22

Posts: 559  

Website

Re: Mixing Devuan Ceres with Siduction?

give it a try, but you may end up with a frankendevuan.

Ogis1975

Member

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 307  

Website

Re: Mixing Devuan Ceres with Siduction?

Packages from external sources might alter files belonging to other packages, configure the system in unexpected ways, introduce vulnerabilities, cause licensing issues.  Once packages from unofficial sources are introduced in a system it can become difficult to pinpoint the cause of breakage especially if it happens after months. Anyway. This is your system. Do what you want

---

What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and state.
            ----+- Peter Kropotkin -+----

brocashelm

Member

Registered: 2020-06-29

Posts: 114  

Re: Mixing Devuan Ceres with Siduction?

Fair enough. I actually tested Siduction on a virtual machine and carefully changed the repositories over to Devuan. There were too many sticky spots when trying to remove Systemd and install Runit or a different init, as their exclusive repositories were still dependent on Systemd to some extent.

I can also see your point that simply removing or installing packages won't cut it. Configuration files have a lot to do with how a system operates.

Funny enough, all my Devuan Ceres systems have specific PPAs (for packages not found in the official repositories, such as Otter Browser and Strawberry) and run just fine. A few hiccups at first, but applying the fixes panned things out. i wouldn't say this is a "FrankenDevuan", as I'm only using the development branches in my repositories. It would've been the case for mixing stable with unstable (or maybe even backports).