It usually takes a very long time to download the AOSP source code. After you have downloaded the AOSP source code, you have actually downloaded a specific version of the AOSP source code from the remote repository. You may have to test different configurations or versions in your development work. It is a very time-consuming task to switch to a different version or create a new copy of the AOSP source code.
In this book, we will use the AOSP source code as the base for our development. To reuse some of the existing open source projects that are not included in AOSP, we have to modify the repo manifest from time to time. This involves changing the repo configuration. To work more efficiently, we can use a local mirror. It can save a lot of time to create a local mirror instead of downloading source code from remote repositories for all configuration changes. It may take hours...
