You are completely right of course, but it is also completely irrelevant. If you work in such a controlled environment where things have to be validated, then this function is clearly not for you. It would likely never work in a satisfactory way.
There are lots of use cases where having a form of forward compatibility is a big bonus, regardless of whether the conversion is incomplete or damaged. At the moment you just get a big middle finger in your face just because of a date / version string in the file, while actual changes are very likely small.
At the moment quite a lot of people are not using the Nightly version at all because of the incompatibility in file formats. I got bitten by this too some years ago. Back then the nightly was broken, it took some months to repair it (I guess it was 7 or more years ago) and I could not open my project in the stable version. That was several months of delay for my hobby project.
Suppose you find a project on gitlab / github you are interested in. If that project is in a newer KiCad version, you can’t even open it. The only way is to install that newer KiCad version. Having multiple KiCad versions installed on Linux is a *&^%$#@! You have to resort to things like snap or flatpak.
I am a big fan of forward compatibility. The Idea is that the S-Expression parsers just dumps any non-supported features (from a future KiCad version) in a log file in some organized way. This gives you both a “best effort” from KiCad, and some overview of which parts need some attention or repair.
I am in a similar situation. However I have been using KiCAD and in particular KiCAD 7 for just about 3 months. I now find myself asking whether I should upgrade to KiCAD 8. I like some of the new features in 8 such as ablity to import Altium and SolidWorks PCB files since I have used those heavily in the past and have some projects I will like to transfer for keep sake. Is there a way to have both installations on my PC?. Also how then do I transfer my settings from KiCAD 7 to the newer version 8
KiCad has a configuration directory for global settings (On Linux in: ~/.config/Kicad/), and you can compare and transfer settings in those directories (each Kicad version has it’s own subdirectory) with a source code merge program such as meldmerge. I’ve posted some screenshots in:
I plan to move to V8 when it will be 8.0.1 or 8.0.2.
Didn’t tried with V8 but when I was moving from V4->V5, V5->V6, V6->V7 I don’t remember problems with that. I suppose at first run I was asked if I want default settings or KiCad should copy settings from previous version.
The only problem I had with library lists - I had to copy them to non system or hidden directory to be able to point on them when asked if I want default or my old library list.
In case of anything went wrong you can delete KiCad V8 configuration directory and KiCad will be thinking it is run for the first time giving you chance to make different decisions.
Paul thanks for the pointers. I will check it out. Unfortunately not on Linux but will check out my installation on my Windows PC to see what I can find. Might just copy my current project files etc to external drive for protection and then do the upgrade. Just have a few projects saved anyway so not much to loose
@Piotr. good point about the libraries. Those I will like to keep as much as possible so will copy them somewhere else for safe keeping before doing any upgrades.