Luke Leighton proposed :

• can i recommend that you discuss amongst yourselves within the devuan team as to precisely and exactly what the direction is?
• can we have a consensus from the team as to whether everyone understands fully the scope of the project, outlines a clear roadmap (and agrees to it), and so on?
• and once that is agreed can i suggest updating the web site to make that consensus absolutely clear?

Although the reporter does not agree fully to the following rewrite, he recognizes important points for the VUA to clarify, that would also help the Devuan Editors to produce a coherent discourse.

Luke Leighton proposed that the ProjectDescription page clarifies the following:

1. your debian system will not be screwed up or compromised by using devuan. you will also not lose any functionality or packages.
2. we understand the difficulty of maintaining an entire distro. we implicitly understand that we will not get to 1,000 maintainers in the immediate future, so we are being realistic and will not be doing a complete fork. it's too much effort for us, and we recognise that you probably wouldn't trust us (i.e. wouldn't even want to try upgrading to devuan) if we created one.
3. we're restricting the scope of what we're doing to a few key strategic packages, and we're going to make it easy for you to remove systemd. that's our core focus.

He proposed the following version:

"Devuan has a simple goal: to make it easy for Debian users to entirely remove systemd yet to keep their Debian systems fully functional, up-to-date and fully compatible with Debian.

The initial method to achieve this will be to add one extra line to sources.list (in a similar fashion to deb-multimedia), where key strategic packages can then be replaced with systemd-free equivalents by simply running 'apt-get upgrade'

Our immediate goal is to provide automated transition scripts integrated into the replacement packages for debian jessie, testing and unstable, and to maintain them indefinitely.

Whilst it may prove unavoidable, we seek to actively avoid a complete fork of Debian (learning the lessons from Ubuntu), not least because we wish to make it easy for users to transition between Devuan and Debian (with and without systemd) and we appreciate that a complete fork would make that much more challenging."