Seeking to understand updates and CentOS versions

[kauer]

I'm not sure how CentOS versioning works. I installed CentOS8.1.1911 a month or so ago. Immediately after that I applied all available updates. There were around fifty or sixty things that got updated as I recall.

Now I see that CentOS8.2.2004 has come out, and yum check-updates shows around 600 updates waiting

My question is this: If I apply all those updates, do I effectively have CentOS8.2.2004 installed?

A not unrelated question is, what level of confidence can I have that installing those updates won't break anything? Myinstall is plain-vanilla, no special drivers, but I do trun a coupl of KVM virtuals on it.

[jlehtone]

My question is this: If I apply all those updates, do I effectively have CentOS8.2.2004 installed?

Yes.

A not unrelated question is, what level of confidence can I have that installing those updates won't break anything?

Red Hat made and did publish RHEL 8.2. They have confidence that it won't break the systems of their paying customers.
CentOS 8 is derived from RHEL 8. That process does not introduce horrific amount of novel bugs.

The Release Notes of CentOS 8.2.2004 and RHEL 8.2 should list known issues.

[gerry666uk]

Let's say you install CentOS 8.1 and it's fully up-to-date.
You then run check-update later the same day, and notice there are no updates.
Why are there no updates? Because it's only a few hours later and nothing has been released yet.
But, you then run check-update a week later, and suddenly there are 20 updates, e.g. security fixes.
You decide to install all 20 updates, and now you are fully up-to-date.
BUT, you are still on CentOS 8.1 at that point.

A few weeks later (now) they release CentOS 8.2
If you now run check-update and install everything, your o/s will suddenly become CentOS 8.2

In other words, updates can happen between minor versions of CentOS.