Hi,

The version you get with pip depends on how you install it there. Following the instructions on the website, you can either install release versions like 1.4 or nightly which we build every night based on the current master branch on github.
If you build from source, you can either build from the current master branch or anything else (like v1.4 tag if you want to build that versions).
Python packages never update automatically. So you will need to do it yourself. If you don’t need the latest feature, you can update only when major versions are released. If you need recent features, you can use nightly builds and update them regularly.
It will be announced when the major release happens. It will be in master and nightly builds before that. If you want to get it as soon as possible, you can watch the github issue so that you get an email when it is fixed. And the next day, the nightly build will have it.