As we already know, Google is the official manager of the entire hardware infrastructure supporting Android—everything is hosted and maintained by Google. The source code repository also provides a web UI to graphically navigate the source code. This source code browser is available at https://android.googlesource.com/.
The following screenshot shows an example of what the page looks like:
Every single item of the list shown in the previous screenshot is a git repository. This can give you a perfect idea of the importance of Google's repo tool—manually managing this many repositories would be pure madness! Using repo, retrieving, downloading, and creating the proper folder structure is a few-lines' task. Let's do it!
First things first—create a working folder. Open a Terminal and create a folder like this:
~$ mkdir WORKING_DIRECTORY ~$ cd WORKING_DIRECTORY
Once in the folder, run:
~/WORKING_DIRECTORY$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
The URL specifies...
