Upgrade will upgrade the system to whatever is newest in your package cache. If, for example, you’ve just performed a partial upgrade and put yourself into an unsupported state, running upgrade without first running update will put your system back in line with itself.
There probably almost never a reason for this, but its the equivalent of running pacman -u which under normal circumstances you will never do
updatepulls the metadata about your packages (to see if there are new versions, and which), whileupgradeapplies the patches.I’ve never understood why the update part isn’t included in the upgrade command, since upgrade is useless without it
Upgrade will upgrade the system to whatever is newest in your package cache. If, for example, you’ve just performed a partial upgrade and put yourself into an unsupported state, running
upgradewithout first runningupdatewill put your system back in line with itself.There probably almost never a reason for this, but its the equivalent of running
pacman -uwhich under normal circumstances you will never doSee you perfectly explained why it should be an option to do this but not the default way