I sent a message earlier, it hasn't been approved yet, but I'll add to it... I finally... after a full day of trying to repo sync got it to complete. I tried everything included in my prior message plus strace repo --trace sync and I just could not find a problem. So finally knowing that I get to 99%, and after that it usually says, for each project:
checking out files 100% (533 of 533) Done.
...I tried:
repo forall -c git checkout
...and it flew through, skipping all projects, until the last said branch jb-devel is not available, which I knew is a gcc-4.7 toolchain in the manifest and is from bitbucket.
Thank God I finally diagnosed the problem. I think I previously had nslookup for bitbucket.org in my /etc/hosts which I had removed. Anyway I changed the toolchain to aosp cause I use gcc-4.8-linaro anyway.
I hope that the process I used can help someone diagnose their repo sync problems, and hopefully get the repo dev's to make it be more verbose, instead of just stalling at 99%!!! Someone can pass this on to any repo dev's to use or help us diagnose that issue:
repo forall -c git checkout