Hello,
I have a Mac mini with a well set up and working installation of Elive 3.8.30 here. Today I have taken a look at the latest Elive release. I found it very mature and now I wonder if I could upgrade my present system to this release without a fresh install and the hassle involved. I know from other distros that you normally cannot skip releases, but I ask anyway. Maybe in the case of Elive it is possible.
Thank you in advance for "enlightenment"
Long answer short: Absolutely ! 
First check out what you might have additionally installed and make a list of those .deb packages.
You can add them when the widget comes up asking you what you want to keep.
If you want an extensive list of what's installed do "dpkg -l" in a terminal and see what catches the eye .... there's a lot. 
Thank you! Sounds great! In that case I will give it a try and see what happens. I'll report back...
Be aware that your existing install will be upgraded and you might miss out on some goodies that are in the new version.
Those can be retrieved with i.e a "dpkg-reconfigure enlightenment" or dpkg-reconfigure thunar"afterwards.
Also: IIRC 3.8.30 is Bullseye based whereas currently we're at Bookworm so there might be some changes in how the repos have their naming and dependencies schemes..... but then an "apug in a terminal" should clear up a lot.
Everything should work smoothly, automated, and as expected 
but if you see anything that is not expected or can be improved, just drop it here, so the installer can be improved to include extra things
So after all there are some caveats. Maybe a clean install would be a more bullet-proof approach which is a bit less comfortable than an automatic procedure. On the other hand you are more in control of what is happening.
If I have a list of all my applications which I need to reinstall later and a backup of my home folder, I should be on the safe side, too. A full upgrade - no matter how you do it - will always need some fine-tuning afterwards.
What would you say?
Sorry for the late response.
My advice would be to simply upgrade and if you don't like the result you can always do a clean install.
Upgrading an existing Elive is a lot faster and, all in all less hassle than modifying the new installation.
Especially considering the hardware an upgrade might be preferable in your case. 
And of course telling the upgrader which packages you want to keep saves a lot of time albeit 3rd party apps (those that come from 3rd party repos) will not be kept.
The upgrader (a fresh install doesn't) does save old configuration files and directories (aptly named "old") so retrieving stuff isn't hard.
And after the whole upgrade of the existing installation I will have a Bookworm-based system on my machine, if I got you right? If so, I will definitely take that route.
exactly. 
Hello,
just a short report after I got the migration done: The upgrade did not work. The installer complained about the existence of an EFI partition, although I had allegedly booted in legacy mode. The partition layout had never been a problem with my old 3.8.30 installation before. It wanted me to reboot in legacy mode, but on a Mac, I have no clue how to set it manually. At least the Mac firmware works differently from a PC BIOS where you just must press a certain key to access it. So this was a vicious circle, and I had no choice but to do a clean install with all the work reconfiguring the new system. It's up and running now, although I still have a problem with the plethora of Enlightenment options as far as windows, iconboxes and systrays are concerned. I guess I will figure it out over time. You cannot have everything at once...
Overall Elive is a very good OS. It is fast, it prolongs the life span of an otherwise obsolete Mac, it looks nice and has many features which can make your life at the computer easier once you know them.
Thanks for the great work - I will keep an attentive eye on Elive's development.
