I am a big proponent of KiCAD, and I occasionally do a project in the nightly build, but I invariably want to go back to stable as well. is there a possibility of allowing the nightly to save as stable projects/files?
Highly unlikely to ever happen. File format migrations are written to migrate forward, not backward. It’s even theoretically impossible to do full backward migration as old formats don’t support new features. Partial backward migration is possible but needs a lot of effort that is not worth it.
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I see some room for confusion in the above discussion. @Frozen001:
Do you mean that you are working in nightly, and using that software you want to take your design and save it in a format which can be read by the most recent stable version? So you would want the newer software to save in an older format. That sounds like incorporating some features into the nightly and does not necessarily put any burden on the stable version software.
Remember, “A burden hand is worth two in the bush.” 
Unfortunately, this request seems pretty unlikely to me. The point of the Nightlies is to be able to add features (that may or may not have equivalents in the previous stable version), get them tested quickly and possibly break things. While some things (like new font options) might have a relatively easy fall back in the form of stroke font, not all features will be so easy.
Adding a requirement that every new feature in nightlies must always have a fall back seems to me like a lot of developer overhead with very little benefit. In general, the nightlies just shouldn’t be used for critical projects so that you don’t run into a case where you need to switch to a stable environment.
All that being said: if you search the forum, there are people who have done some portion of this work in terms of patching nightly KiCad to save most of the content to stable file format. (I don’t have the link to hand unfortunately, sorry)
Thanks for the information…. I understand the hurdles and the push to add features… but many commercial pieces software has this feature (think Autocad, MS office, etc.), which can be useful if you collaborate with others who are not as willing to use potentially unstable software. Anyway thanks again for the information, not a deal breaker, just thought I would toss it out there.
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