I must lament for a bit what I see to be a great lack of foresight when dealing with Android. From the official documentation to any site that I have tried to visit there seems to be one thing which is not discussed. There is an unwritten rule taken nearly religiously: Those that use 'repo' don't talk about 'repo'.
Repo is this all powerful super tool built on top of git, another all powerful super tool, which allows for the concurrent management of multiple projects that are used to form one super project. There is just one catch, nothing but the most simplistic of usage examples are available.
As it turns out the entire documentation is hidden in the program itself. As not to be too obvious, when you type the standard 'repo --help' you get a fairly unuseful help message:
Usage: repo [-p|--paginate|--no-pager] COMMAND [ARGS]
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-p, --paginate display command output in the pager
--no-pager disable the pager
--trace trace git command execution
--time time repo command execution
--version display this version of repo
Nothing in here is very useful. What are the available commands that are referred to here? Nothing there would point you to the most helpful repo command. Try typing 'repo help', note the missing double dash, and here is what you get:
usage: repo COMMAND [ARGS]Wait, what is this? A list of every nearly every command available along with useful information at the end telling you how to find EVERY command that repo uses? Why the bloody hell was this not put in the first help message? Was it too troublesome to add a line at the end like "See 'repo help' for a list of commands."? Even the official documentation, at most, lists using 'repo help COMMAND' but gives no indication that leaving off 'COMMAND' would then show you all the possible commands.
The most commonly used repo commands are:
abandon Permanently abandon a development branch
branch View current topic branches
branches View current topic branches
checkout Checkout a branch for development
checkout-manifest for every project in a manifest tag file check out the sha1 listed in the file
cherry-pick Cherry-pick a change.
diff Show changes between commit and working tree
download Download and checkout a change
format-patch build patch sets for each project common to a manifest baseline
grep Print lines matching a pattern
init Initialize repo in the current directory
list List projects and their associated directories
overview Display overview of unmerged project branches
prune Prune (delete) already merged topics
push Push the local branch
rebase Rebase local branches on upstream branch
smartsync Update working tree to the latest known good revision
stage Stage file(s) for commit
start Start a new branch for development
status Show the working tree status
sync Update working tree to the latest revision
tag-manifest for every project in a manifest tag use the sha1 listed in the file set the tagname to it
upload Upload changes for code review
See 'repo help' for more information on a specific command.
See 'repo help --all' for a complete list of recognized commands.
Hopefully someone finds this post useful, I know it has taken me a long time to find this bit of information, I now put it out here in hope that others aren't as lost as I was for so long. I will now be perusing and learning more about this powerful tool.
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