On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 12:47:51PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

Dear Git Gurus,

In DataLad (https://datalad.org) we are doing lots of automated cloning,
fetching etc as part of our CI etc jobs.  Once in a while git operations
fail [see e.g. 1], and beg us to retry but we need to know when to
do so, and not do it upon every failed git invocation since some
failures could be legit (repository is gone). While looking how others
solve it we found
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35014012/git-retry-if-http-request-failed
which pointed to tools like git-retry and later part of
https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/HEAD/go/src/infra/tools/git/retry_regexp.go
which serve as a collection of regexes to be on lookout for to retry.

Would that be the "best" strategy currently?  

Looking at the actual git_retry.py script [1], it really just wraps
actual Git commands. IMO, git-retry(1) shell script as you mentioned
only calls the python version, which adds another level of indirection
(why not doing it in pure shell?).

AFAIK, to solve the retrying problem, we need to have a way to tell
transport backend (curl/ssh) to resume transfer from the faulty point.

As regex matching might eventually break whenever `git` changes
anything in the output messages, I wondered if there could be a more
robust internal implementation in git itself?  Similarly git-annex has
annex.retry config setting which sets the count of retries for
"retriable" operations.  

Do you use porcelain interfaces instead of plumbing ones?

Thanks.

[1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git/+/01d2cde990f22d409e74e239de7e4d347102d6f6/git_retry.py

-- 
An old man doll... just what I always wanted! - Clara