Failure time and hosts: setting a shorter timeout and a well-known set of hosts

Question

If I understood correctly that buildout internally uses setuptools, and setuptools ramdomly scrapes HTML pages in the hope of finding eggs. This leads to the following problem if any critical node is down and refers to PyPi README, etc.:

Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found! Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found! Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found! Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found! Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found! 

Since each fetch of the URL will 1) build the block 2) the timeout in the long run creates pain (takes several hours)

How to set up the layout

• Waiting time faster

• Do not scratch arbitrary URLs and what is a good known URL for Plone and common add-ons

Answer 1

To set a timeout of five seconds, use bin/buildout -t 5

Answer 2

Set the allow-hosts parameter in the buildout section, for example:

 [buildout] allow-hosts = *.python.org 

This forces you to build only a PyPI view for download.