Question

After I have downloaded a gingerbread system build using the following commands, how do I later come back and find which Android tag it was derived from?

repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b gingerbread
repo sync

NOTE: The ‘gingerbread’ tag above seems to be a ‘rolling’ tag that moves as and when google releases a new gingerbread build.
I would like to find out the tag with the release number in, e.g: android-2.3.1_r1

Answer 1

gingerbread is indeed a “rolling tag”, which is what we usually call a branch. 🙂

The gingerbread branch will contain the latest gingerbread release + patches received accecpted through the AOSP (usually called gingerbread+AOSP).

Running the command git describe should provide you with the latest tag your current commit is based on:

$ git describe
android-2.3.3_r1a-49-gaa0ddd0

However you cannot do this for the entire Andorid repo, only for the individual git repositories. Fortunately they are all tagged with the same tag for each release, such as android-2.3.3_rx.

Run:

$ repo forall -c "pwd; git describe"

to get the latest tag for all the repositories in the Android repo hierarchy.