Bored librarians = problems for reliably opening completed designs

[Art]

I keep running into problems with 3d modules/footprints being renamed, folder structure containing those modules getting renamed and then legacy designs become corrupted. I know the party line: "You should make a copy of your own footprints and 3d modules" I've been doing that with the footprints but hoped that at least 3d modules would stay relatively unchanged. Apparently not! Some bored librarian had to go and change the name of existing folders. Naturally the name of the folder "TO_SOT_Packages_SMD.3dshapes" was not descriptive enough and had to become "Package_TO_SOT_SMD.3dshapes" and so on, and so forth...

  This is asinine! The whole idea of making your local copies of footprints and everything else is asinine! You waste hard drive space for superfluous duplicates, you have to manually copy those modules from kicad folder to your local folder and once those are copied, you are stuck with what you've got, any future updates/corrections to the "official" footprints/modules never get propagated.

At the very least there should be a mechanism to automatically copy footprints/3d modules to your local library and then only allow the use those local copies. Since you keep messing around with official libraries, those should not be even allowed to be referenced in the design! What needs to happen is you configure the path for your local folders for footprints and 3dmodules and then when you go and select a footprint or 3d module for your component it is automatically copied to your local folder and all the references are saved to that local copy.

This has been the bane of my existence with KiCad since the earlier days.

[Art (diametrix)]

Application: kicad
Version: (6.0.0-rc1-dev-1381-gaefb1f62e), release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1 (WinSSL) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.6 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.68.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.61.1
    Compiler: GCC 8.2.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Frank Severinsen (shack)]

Library issues should not go here, but rather https://github.com/kicad in the appropriate repo

Libray renaming etc is only done within major releases.
If you want, you can keep both 4.0.7 libraries and 5.0.2 libraries in the same folder, so your designs aren't broken.
But as a librarian I can inform you we are not doing this to mess with you or because we are bored.