I'm kind of disillusioned by Sury's response to this. His cavalier response that - well, devuan wasn't ever supported anyway just isn't helpful.

I'll guess I'll try to continue rebuiding new releases -- without systemd baked in -- as time allows, we'll have to see how that goes. it may become more difficult over time as sury/debian change/tweak their packages to further rely on systemd quirks, api's and functions.

I don't necessarily see a problem with moving the responsibility for tmp files management over to opentmpfiles, provided that is then made available as a package/depencency. But it shouldn't require a systemd equivs package, that seems hacky and not a sensible longterm solution. His code, if we're going to use it should check to see which command is available, and then use it.

I haven't looked at exactly what the PHP-FPM code is doing when it reports the "systemd monitor" stuff to syslog, I don't know if it's trying to negotiate with systemd on some level, or if it's just making information available. Regardless, it's writing unnecessary log lines and executing un-necesary code, so it seems better to me to build a package --without-fpm-systemd. So that the code isn't there and isn't running.