Tips and tricks useful to "checkout" (download) the Android source code more quickly

Question

Viewing and searching the Android source code is simple. You simply visit the AndroidXRef website.

But, if you want to build and run the bleeding-edge version of Superuser, you must first download an entire Android source tree.

Imagine that I want to grab the Android "master" branch from source control.

If I follow Google's official instructions:

• The operation will definitely take at least an hour. It may take half a day or more.
• It will probably pull in tens of gigabytes of data. Where I live, ISPs sometimes charge an "overage fee" when users pull in tens of gigabytes of data in one month. I don't enjoy paying fees or surcharges.

In short, doing an ordinary repo sync command would probably be slow and wasteful. I don't need the entire history of Android development; and I don't have infinite disk space.

How can I check out the Android source code more quickly?

1. I know that doing a "shallow clone" would help. How can I do this?

2. Rakesh writes, elsewhere, that repo sync -c will help. Will it? I've read the documentation for the -c option. But I don't understand Git well enough to know whether or not the option will actually help at all. Here's a related discussion.

3. (Optional:) Are there any other tips or tricks which can I use to speed up the checkout operation?

4. (Optional:) In the end, how much disk space will I require in order to hold the checked-out code?

P.S. I thank durron597 for the advice s/he gave me in chat last week. Any resulting improvements which have been made to this question are all thanks to him/her.

Answer 1

1. repo init --depth=1 (according to repo help init)
2. -c downloads only current branch. Only useful if you don't use --depth because depth implies -c (according to git help clone)
3. I just downloaded it (20-07-2017) and the history takes up 21GB. I have checked out the studio-master-dev branch, which takes up another 15GB. So in total 36GB.