Well, it seems that I have done something to my installation that is preventing me from updating to the new stable release. I did switch to unstable briefly and installed a package, only to quickly revert it.
Looks like wrong command above was used (pacman -f). -f is supposed to have a number after it but it is also supposed to be pacman-mirrors. Try this for our country.
Yes, my bad… the command was “pacman-mirrors -f”, I should have cut & pasted.
I subsequently opened pamac, checked for updates,… all up to date. So then I adjusted my mirrors from Worldwide to just the United States and then sync’ed again… and this time. lo and behold, updates available.
I then went back to the command line and ran “pacman -Syyu” and it too now has updates. No clue as to why… repos? doubt it, some link between pamac and pacman where both needed to be refreshed? Could be… but unknown to me.