git clone against firewall

From: Sebastian Pipping <webmaster@hartwork.org>
Date: Jan 14, 2010, 23:45 UTC
Message-ID: <4B4FACB1.2080902@hartwork.org>

hello!

with a firewall blocking outgoing connections to port 9418 a

  git clone git://...

of git 1.6.6 seems to never return, i.e. loop forever. in my rather automated environment (gentoo's tool layman calling git) this behavior is rather troublesome - i need some kind of abort-and-error instead: what i'm trying to do is loop over a number of clone URL alternatives of the same repository like ..

  git://git.overlays.gentoo.org/dev/dberkholz.git
  http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitroot/dev/dberkholz.git
  git+ssh://git@git.overlays.gentoo.org/dev/dberkholz.git

.. and stop at the first clone that returns without error.

are there means to make git fail in such a case or to apply a timout? if not please consider adding a related commandline option to git-clone.

thank you.

sebastian