William Morder wrote:

> I am contemplating some kind of FrankenDebian hack (or rather,
> FrankenDevuan). I seem to recall that somebody mentioned that sysvinit
> could be installed, and systemd purged, on a Debian system. The do
> upgrades from the Debian repositories, but keep sysvinit and avoid the
> systemd problems.

I discussed this in the debian user list. I was pointed out that installing
sysv* (don't know exactly which one) replaces systemd as init process.
I have installed
ii  sysv-rc                                 2.88dsf-59.9                               
all          System-V-like runlevel change mechanism
ii  sysvinit-core                           2.88dsf-59.9                               
amd64        System-V-like init utilities
ii  sysvinit-utils                          2.88dsf-59.9                               
amd64        System-V-like utilities

systemd is still there, but it is not the init process and all works just
fine.

ii  dbus-user-session                       1.10.26-0+deb9u1                           
all          simple interprocess messaging system (systemd --user
integration)
ii  libpam-systemd:amd64                    232-25+deb9u3                              
amd64        system and service manager - PAM module
ii  libsystemd0:amd64                       232-25+deb9u3                              
amd64        systemd utility library
ii  libsystemd0:i386                        232-25+deb9u3                              
i386         systemd utility library
ii  systemd                                 232-25+deb9u3                              
amd64        system and service manager
ii  systemd-shim                            10-3                                       
amd64        shim for systemd

I am pretty happy with this setup.

regards