As mentioned in the comments of the accepted answer, you can change the default version in manifest.xml. It has a snippet of repo help init :
Enable manifest branches
To switch to a different manifest branch, repo init -b otherbranch can be used in an existing client. However, since this only updates the manifest, a subsequent repo sync (or repo sync -d ) is needed to update the working directory files.
This will not load everything freshly, but will perform the necessary git operations to check the correct branch / tag in the projects. In fact, if you run it with --trace , you will see that it is a little more than just a git checkout .
NOTE. If you use this method, you must make sure that you provide the same parameters for the repo-init as for the previous call. In particular, if you provided the -g options, put them again or repo sync , now unnecessary directories in the new set of groups will be deleted.
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