Jessie (Devuanised) upgrade to ASCII was successful with a few dpkg
messages. The system asked how and when daemons could be restarted and
listed non-empty directories that couldn't be removed. The adwaita
icons failed to be copied: the upgrade gave me this warning. I also
ended up with two versions of the Lazarus Pascal IDE being installed.
System boot seems to take longer than before but this is a machine
from the Paleozoic era!
Now, after more than a year I can enjoy once again web-browsing free
from nagging advertisements. It is still too early to make a proper
evaluation of the entire upgrade but I pleased to heaven's high that
my Linux experience is slowly being restored to what it used to be.
Well done from the deepest of my heart! There must be some real gurus
working on Devuan: the network is fast delivering about 4 Mega Bytes
per second.