[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] iofthestorm:
Let's play a little game here. Go back through the past 5 pages just to be brief and count the number of posts from people who reported issues resulting from a dirty flash, and the number of posts telling people not to post if they dirty flashed. Which ones are clogging up the thread again? Seriously, we get that dirty flashing causes issues, you don't need to circle jerk each other every time you see the word dirty flash.

Also for the record, nowhere is it stated that you must dirty flash to make bug reports. For one thing, I'm pretty sure absolutely 0 device maintainers read this thread, or at least they don't post here. Perhaps this would have been a development thread if people stuck to bug reports with detailed information and logs but this became a de facto discussion thread a long time ago. As such, it's not entirely useless to post about issues people have with dirty flashes because not everyone is going to wipe data every time. I know a lot of device maintainers don't bother with a full wipe each time because hell, they're changing stuff all the time and there's no point wiping data each time if you're actually going to use the phone at all.

The thing is that not wiping data primarily causes problems with installed apps, because that's what lives on /data. Thus, if someone reports that they lost 4G after a dirty flash (just as an example) wtf do you think wiping data is supposed to do? Obviously if you're getting force closes all over the place you should wipe /data, but maybe try selectively clearing data for problematic apps first to narrow down the problem rather than just giving up and wiping everything. Believe it or not, that's actually valuable information. In fact, rather than just perpetuate superstitions and wipe willy nilly why not look at logcat and figure out why apps are force closing? That's information that helps real development happen, not just crack flashers flashing a nightly every day and *****ing about their problems to each other, and then *****ing about other people's *****ing, which to be frank is what 90% of this thread is.

Lastly, stop *****ing at people for reporting bugs on builds that are a day or two old. We're mature adults here (supposedly), we can read Gerrit and find out what commits actually went in to builds. Most of the time hardly anything changes from one day's build to the next, especially nothing much device specific. Unless the commit is from your device maintainers it probably doesn't even apply to your device (see the Samsung RIL commit from a few days ago that had nothing to do with d2vzw). If you don't understand the code don't speculate on what improvements it might bring or you'll just be let down repeatedly, or feel placebo effects.

(FWIW I am a software developer, I don't work on Android ROMs but I'm literate enough in systems programming and have read enough Android code to know what's going on most of the time and I don't go around talking about what's coming in the next build etc. This is just my thoughts as a developer who hates getting unspecific and useless bug reports. Feel free to flame me or whatever, I don't give a damn, but I just wish this thread was actually useful instead of adding 10 pages with 0 content every damn day).

Oh, and this is just my personal policy for updating nightlies, but I think it serves as a reasonable baseline to follow with these kinds of things.

Steps:

0) Back up all your stuff (titanium, nandroid, etc)

1) Wipe cache/dalvik (I don't think even this is strictly necessary because Android rebuilds the dalvik cache on an OS upgrade anyway, but it takes seconds so why not)

2) Flash ROM of choice

3) Flash gapps

4) Reboot, check for issues

5) Try to solve issues by looking at logcat if you can, if not, move on to 6

6) Wipe data, restore your apps and stuff

7) Still have issues? Wipe data, restore apps selectively.

8) Still have issues? Post on a development thread with detailed information about the error, including all relevant logs (logcat -b main for general issues, logcat -b radio for radio issues, /proc/last_kmsg if you had hard lockups, dmesg output if it's relevant, etc).