Many times I have seen people upgrading the packages on their system, and I have noticed that some of them specifically run:
sudo apt-get upgrade
Before running:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Is this really necessary? Doesn't running dist-upgrade cover what upgrade does and more? Or is there some real reason to run the upgrade command before the dist-upgrade command?
No, it's not necessary and from my experience, I can confirm that.
Everything else is superstition, just as the claim that I must re-start my system when a configuration has been changed. Perhaps you then feel better, but it's not necessary. But that's another story. ;)
From man apt-get
dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages
