OK .... after quite a struggle I managed to "upgrade" my existing 3.8.17 (religiously apugged as @IamElive once nicely said) that had already been moved to Bullseye manually a while back.
Here are my gripes/bugs:
Conky starts up on the live-cd desktop despite being disabled in the welcome menu.
No biggy but not how it should be.
Despite having Bullseye repositories, somehow Elive has a very old version of Firefox-esr which does not allow re-using the existing profile.
Elive installs version 78.15.0esr-1~deb11u1 where a quick search for Bullseye gives 91.11.0esr-1~deb11u1. Installing the latter version allows using the existing profile with all its bookmarks, saved passwords, etc.
Thunderbird has the same issue: version 1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1 is installed where in the Bullseye repositories 1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1 is available.
Again installing the latter solves the lost profile (and mail settings) issue.
So how is it that Elive has older versions than Debian11 itself?
I personally cannot see any differences in repositories.
On my machine 'catfish' file search wasn't installed. I find that an omission.
It's stupid that on an upgrade (keeping users and settings) something trivial like printer settings (cups and sane) disappears. requiering a total setup again of scanners and printers.
good to know that this update solves that issue. the version / repository thingy is not an issue, that's because the next day 3.8.30 was released, debian was updated 11.3 -> 11.4 , that's why the new version appears later
was replaced by searchmonkey, maybe you want to restart to a new desktop configuration?
fixed, can you confirm that the confs that needs to be copied back from the previous /etc dir (see that you have a copy of it on your / ) is the directories "cups" and "sane.d" ? (you can try copying them back to see if works and/or something else is needed)
so it will only work for drivers that doesn't requires extra installations (many drivers are already included), mmh, and I assume this doesn't pose any possible "conflict" problem when upgrading otherwise should be not included
Yes, or they could've been added to '/etc/elive/packages_to_maintain_installed', I think. I forgot to add them, alas.
3.8.30 does have 'printer-driver-brlaser' already installed which has my DCP-1510 working OTOB but for the scanner functions requires additional 'brscan4' installation.
Hence my thought about doing a 'apt list --installed>pack-list-old.txt' on the existing system and comparing that to what's going to be installed.
I did that to check out with 'meld' to find out if there were other packages that were downgraded like 'thunderbird' or 'firefox'.
Ultimately, it turned out they were the only 2 packages that got a lower version.