Re: Request: timeout option for remote operations, esp. "git fetch"

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:33:49AM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> > Which means that your original wish may not be granted with
> > SO_KEEPALIVE at all, no?  I was wondering if you wanted a forced
> > timeout based on alarm(2), something similar to what you added to
> > git-daemon in 960deccb (git-daemon: timeout, eliminate double DWIM,
> > 2005-10-19).
> > 
> 
> Yes, something more like that on the client end.  SO_KEEPALIVE is better
> than nothing, but not really good enough.

Would it be enough to just use timeout(1), like:

  timeout 10m git fetch

That will time the _whole_ fetch operation, which means a legitimately
gigantic but fast fetch would still fail. Setting a shorter timeout only
for periods of inactivity on the network socket would catch killed or
very laggy connections. But it would not catch a server that feeds you
data at a constant but ridiculously slow rate.

-Peff