External repo checkout timeout issue

[Uday Kumar Reddy Bondhugula]

Hello,

Is there a way to increase the timeout used on checkout of external repositories? In this log below, the external repo is a 'new_git_repository' with an SSH g...@github.com URL.  

Error in fail: error running 'git fetch origin refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*' while working with @llvm-raw:
Timed out
ERROR: no such package '@llvm-raw//utils/bazel': error running 'git fetch origin refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*' while working with @llvm-raw:
Timed out
INFO: Elapsed time: 1802.516s

A search for "timeout" in the list of options at https://docs.bazel.build/versions/main/command-line-reference.html only yields an option relevant to HTTP downloads. I can confirm here that the above timeout was a result of an issue (transient) causing a very low download bandwidth from github.com (limiting the b/w to 150 KiB/s).

bazel version: 4.2.1.

Thanks,

-Uday

[Konstantin]

Are you sure timeout is caused by Bazel and not by the Git itself? Because I don't see any timeout here: https://cs.opensource.google/bazel/bazel/+/master:tools/build_defs/repo/git.bzl 

Another idea - you could use "shallow_since" attribute to reduce the size of the necessary download.