[Sony Xperia T, TL, TX, V] kerberizer:
If you have been referred to this post for the various CyanogenMod builds, you might better check the new GUIDE.

I hope I haven't somehow offended you. In fact, I probably have far less reasons than you to not understand all those changes, and yet much too often I feel completely baffled by them. ;)

Hmm, let me try to explain this. Actually, I don't quite have first-hand experience with CM, so my assumptions are based mainly on my observations, what I've read, and my experience with other software projects. This means I can be very well wrong, but I actually hope that the more knowledgeable folks here will correct me in that case. And apologies to all of you who already know these things, but I guess it might be helpful for other people too, as similar questions often get asked (and I've asked myself plenty of times).

The nightlies are regular automatic builds of the CM source. Because changes get constantly pushed to the CM source from various developers, these builds reflect a more or less random state of the code, and because there's no human intervention in deciding whether to build or not, the nightlies can contain random bugs. Actually, the larger and most severe bugs are typically filtered out by the preliminary testing and review process before they even get committed, but it's impossible to catch everything that way. Indeed, the nightlies' primary purpose is just to make sure that the code still builds correctly. Nevertheless, they are also a rather useful tool for large-scale testing -- and that's how these not-so-huge bugs get caught as well. :victory: On a side note, the more substantial changes and/or the ones that could possibly break a lot of things (or few things really bad) get tested with the experimental builds (or that has been my impression, again).

The stable version is (often, if not always) a snapshot of the source code that is deemed stable. When a stable release is planned, the commits are gradually restricted to only the ones that fix things; the ones that "merely" introduce new functionality (which could potentially bring new bugs) are postponed until after the release (the code is "frozen"). In this process, the code gets several preliminary snapshots, namely, the release candidates, which should reflect the advancements in the code stabilization and bug fixing. Snapshots, BTW, mean exactly that: the current version of the code gets marked with a tag.

So, the nightlies and the release candidates are effectively based on the same code, but the RCs should (at least in theory) reflect a more or less stable state of the code as determined by a human developer (as opposed to the random state of the code for the nightlies).

The enigmatic FXP builds... I haven't noticed a central repository with code specific to them (if there is such, please do let me know). My best guess is that they are manual builds of the CM code with some patches by the FreeXperia team developers. And I'm pretty sure that most of these patches (except perhaps some that turn out to behave badly) get promptly committed to the general CM source. So, it's somewhat hard to tell (for me, that is) what's the exact difference between an FXP build and the nightly of that same day. There might be even none code-wise, but the FXP builds are still manual (I think), so it makes sense to expect them to be more stable (whether because the current code has been confirmed stable enough, or because particularly problematic one has been patched). I guess they might be considered the equivalent of the CM monthlies in the Xperia domain, just more frequent. ;)

---------- Post added at 02:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:40 PM ----------

[MENTION=4695495]moly82[/MENTION], [MENTION=4292571]syntesys[/MENTION], could you, guys, please confirm whether you encounter the camera bug that I described a few posts earlier? Switch to camera, then tilt the device between portrait and landscape repeatedly. In only a few iterations, the display should appear to freeze. (the phone can be rebooted via ADB or turned off with power+volume_up, as usual).