AndroidRepoCheckout

Android repo/git checkout

Android code is developed internally and pushed to the android.git.kernel.org git repositories at regular intervals. Such a code drop consists of pushes to many git repositories. The tool called repo and a meta git repository called manifest make it possible to get all the code needed to build your own Android system.

The complexity of the git/repo tools itself combined by a general lack of information about branching makes it hard to really know what to checkout. If you just follow the guide on
the Android website you will end-up checking out the master version of the meta (manifest) repository. This manifest checkout on it’s turn will checkout the master branch version of all the components (Have a lolook at .repo/manifest.xml and specially the default revision tag). This certainly doesn’t match any released version of the source code.

Getting an overview of the branches/tags

To know what branch/tag you want to checkout you can either look at the git log of the manifest git repo http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/manifest.git;a=heads or go into .repo/manifest and run
git branch -r ; git tag or run git gui to get a better understanding of what is going on. If you want to checkout a specific version e.g. “2.3” and not the head of the branch you should checkout using a tag. Once you did a init of your repo using repo init you can afterwards do a repo sync to sunc all the projects.

running git gui on the manifest git repo

Getting gingerbread

I hope this is right (if not please help me!).

mkdir android-gingerbread
repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git  -b gingerbread
#
# Check that the manifest is correct open .repo.manifest.xml
#  <default revision="gingerbread"
#           remote="korg" />
repo sync..