[gentoo-user] How do I make connection attempts in Git timeout sooner?

[gentoo-user] How do I make connection attempts in Git timeout sooner?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

With overlays.gentoo.org being down, by update script takes a long time 
to complete. Instead of Git telling me immediately that it can't connect 
to the server, it just sits there for whole minutes doing nothing before 
it decides to abort.

This is extremely frustrating. Is there a way to change this behavior of 
Git? Other software doesn't seem to have this problem (for example if I 
browse to a web server that's down, the browser immediately tells me 
that it can't connect, rather going for a coffee break first.)

Re: [gentoo-user] How do I make connection attempts in Git timeout sooner?

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 01:14:28PM +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote
> With overlays.gentoo.org being down, by update script takes a long time 
> to complete. Instead of Git telling me immediately that it can't connect 
> to the server, it just sits there for whole minutes doing nothing before 
> it decides to abort.
> 
> This is extremely frustrating. Is there a way to change this behavior of 
> Git? Other software doesn't seem to have this problem (for example if I 
> browse to a web server that's down, the browser immediately tells me 
> that it can't connect, rather going for a coffee break first.)

  Unfortunately, the git client itself can't do this, due to "keepalive"
code built into git.  See
http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Request-timeout-option-for-remote-operations-esp-quot-git-fetch-quot-td7598943.html

  About the only thing you can do is use the "timeout" command to launch
git as a subcommand, e.g.

timeout 1m git fetch

  The downside of this approach is that if the git server is feeding
data very slowly, your git client gets killed after the time limit, even
if it's 90% of the way through the download. 

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

[gentoo-user] Re: How do I make connection attempts in Git timeout sooner?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 17/01/14 00:38, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 01:14:28PM +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote
>> With overlays.gentoo.org being down, by update script takes a long time
>> to complete. Instead of Git telling me immediately that it can't connect
>> to the server, it just sits there for whole minutes doing nothing before
>> it decides to abort.
>>
>> This is extremely frustrating. Is there a way to change this behavior of
>> Git? Other software doesn't seem to have this problem (for example if I
>> browse to a web server that's down, the browser immediately tells me
>> that it can't connect, rather going for a coffee break first.)
>
>    Unfortunately, the git client itself can't do this, due to "keepalive"
> code built into git.  See
> http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Request-timeout-option-for-remote-operations-esp-quot-git-fetch-quot-td7598943.html
>
>    About the only thing you can do is use the "timeout" command to launch
> git as a subcommand, e.g.
>
> timeout 1m git fetch
>
>    The downside of this approach is that if the git server is feeding
> data very slowly, your git client gets killed after the time limit, even
> if it's 90% of the way through the download.

This is weird. How can you "keep alive" something that's dead from the 
beginning? :-/ AFAIK, "keep alive" in networking refers to keeping an 
active connection alive. Here, a connection can't even be established in 
the first place. The server is down.