How do developers who customise AOSP keep their changes under version control?

Question

Fetching the AOSP source, is 134GB.

A checkout of a particular version of Android is likely to be many GBs.

How do developers who customise AOSP keep their changes under (their own) version control? (Given that checking-in a snapshot of an Android version's source will be many GBs.)

Answer 1

This is my flow, maybe not the best....

I don't like dealing with repo tool and multiple remotes, so I get rid of all the .git subfolders and create just one tremendously huge repository. This has the bad effect of essentially removing all the "history". So we have a server with the original sync for git blame if we need to.

First check-out for a developer will be time-consuming either way. To make it faster, we have a local bare git repo cloned. So people run git clone on the local server, and the switch the origin to the actual remote.

After all is set-up, the day-to-day dealings are not time consuming. Commits and pushes are quite fast ( maybe 5-10s ) even for a large repo like this. Thanks GIT!