When you are working with AOSP repo you can create a local manifest folder and store your own manifest files for your own projects. As our project grows though we continue to add more projects to our manifest. We track this manifest file on git so we can all stay current.
The problem is that when you call repo sync you have to pull all the changes to your local manifest file first. If you don't you may miss out on required projects someone else has added. Well, repo is capable of syncing it's own manifest file and does so automatically when you call repo sync. Is there a way to have our own manifest file also get updated automatically at the same time before the actual sync occurs? I'd rather not use some extra script to do it, it would be really awesome if repo could handle this on it's own and I feel like it should be able to.
This sounds like a reasonable request. You might want to post it to the repo-discuss mailing list to get some traction (or get an explanation why it's a bad idea).
From my point of view, the point of local manifests is that they're... local. If you want to persist changes and share between different users via Git, why not modify the original manifest file (typically default.xml)? You've branched the manifest git anyway, and adding a separate section with your gits shouldn't cause much grief when merging.