[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.