pkg upgrade: don't upgrade packages that aren't installed

[Jim L.]

I thought pkg(8) wasn't supposed to upgrade packages that aren't installed. Is there a way to prevent this?

On FreeBSD 14.3-STABLE:

# pkg info | grep apache
# pkg upgrade -n apache24

Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 11 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
apache24: 2.4.64 [FreeBSD]
apr: 1.7.5.1.6.3_4 [FreeBSD]
brotli: 1.1.0,1 [FreeBSD]
curl: 8.14.1 [FreeBSD]
expat: 2.7.1 [FreeBSD]
gdbm: 1.25 [FreeBSD]
jansson: 2.14.1 [FreeBSD]
libnghttp2: 1.66.0 [FreeBSD]
libpsl: 0.21.5_2 [FreeBSD]
libssh2: 1.11.1,3 [FreeBSD]
pcre2: 10.45_1 [FreeBSD]

Number of packages to be installed: 11

The process will require 46 MiB more space.
10 MiB to be downloaded.

The man page says:

pkg upgrade will not install new packages, except as required to fulfil dependencies of the packages listed on the command line.

which I suppose excuses all but the first one. Regarding apache24 itself, the man page says:

A caller should ensure that patterns specified as arguments have installed candidates for matching.

but doesn't specifically define any behavior when the caller ensures that NO installed candidates match the request.