One of the most awkward issues in the previous KiCAD release was how libraries were managed and stored. if you updated the library, it got over-written in updates, and there seemed to be no good storage plan for private or updated libraries. Has this been addressed in the new version?
I have been doing board layout for 25+ years, and found library management in EVERY tool was really not well thought out, and many factory libraries were full of errors and inconsistencies or lacked vital and common items, a very frustrating situation. This means library mods are inevitable and required, not to mention the need for adding custom items. Being able to handle this well during updates is very helpful.
I have my own local libs in a separate folder (that I can also more easily back up if needed) and update KiCAD on regular basis… never had a problem with that.
Now, on the other hand, if you place your own libs in the KiCAD folder or store your own parts in the libs that come with KiCAD I can imagine stuff happening.
Unfortunately NO. There has been some discussion about this months ago and all the devs agreed that library components should be tagged and that only fixes should be propagated within the stable series. Unfortunately with a lot of current changes it’s not realistic to track all this and tag things. On top of that, the github plugin isn’t aware of any source of tags to consult so it will pull the latest - whatever it is. So the only thing I can suggest is that you pull everything you believe you will need, then manage it all manually. You can at least be sure that your projects are using known data.
One of the disruptive changes to the data set is the renaming of groups and the reclassification of parts within groups. There is no One Good Solution to address this.