What should happen if bzr is unable to complete a task?

[Maritza Mendez]

I've discussed this briefly with Alexander in the special context of 'bzr
qbranch' in Bazaar Explorer, but there is a more general question I am
trying to express.  Please help me find the best way to ask this question.

I have a badly behaving set of computers at work.  Actually, I think the
problem is with the subnet and our IT guys are working on it.  But meanwhile
it has made me think about a more general question.  What we see is that a
'bzr branch' operation can hang if the parent location is outside our
firewall.  Inside, no problem.  At some point, the progress bar freezes and
nothing happens.  I've waited at least ten minutes in some cases.  Nothing.
In each case, we see that the working directory has been created with the
expected structure but no working tree (obviously) and there is a .fetch
file.  We're able to determine that the bzr process is still holding a
handle to the fetch file, but the file has stopped growing.

No problem: kill bzr and start over.  The fact that this happens more often
than not for us is our problem.  We have some network problem that
mysteriously affects bzr and (as far as we know) nothing else.   We're
working on that.

But what about unattended scripts?  And what about the bzr-explorer and
future tools which invoke bzr (rather than calling bzrlib)?  How should they
recover if bzr stalls because it can't get what it needs?

Is it already possible for me to set a timeout?  And is there a case to be
made for transport operations to have timeouts to allow graceful recovery
when a resource (like a network) goes away?  Maybe this already exists?
Note that because the same version of bzr (1.15-1) works everyplace else
we've tried -- including at home! -- I am assuming the problem is with our
network.  I do not know if this assumption is true.

Thoughts?

-M
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