I'm not sure we can actually safely cancel a thread task here. We can use an event, but because git.Repo.clone_from if a blocking call, the event can't be processed within clone_task until after git.Repo.clone anyway. We can also check for a timeout outside of the task and do task.join(timeout=n) to unblock ProgressGitPuller and code higher up, but the thread will continue to run in the background still. Is that sufficient?

The work I have done to explore this is in a branch on my fork: issue12/git_clone_timeout

I think thread running in the background is lesser evil. I think the worst case scenario right now is that the git process is stuck and user cannot do anything. I do not remember the relevant code good enough to advise here, but can take a look at your branch - forgot to push?

I did forget to push. Sorry about that. It should be up to date now