KAUST (or KSA?) internet can be flaky at times and my "make" was (silently) hanging indefinitely while trying to connect to mcs.anl.gov. Manually touching .nagged allows my build to proceed. The hang could be fixed by adding a reasonable timeout, but I can't find a timeout in urllib. Aron suggests that I try curl because all built-in Python url libraries are terrible, but I don't think we can depend on curl being installed, so we'd have to fall back to something. We could implement a timeout using threads, if threads weren't broken on some architectures.
Meanwhile, the professor next to me runs Little Snitch on his Mac and wants to know why PETSc's build is trying to connect to Argonne's servers. His first thought was that it was a there for surveillance. PETSc has a significant number of users that work behind firewalls or are otherwise sensitive to outgoing connections. Although nagupgrade helps people stay updated and reduces some support email, I think it is unprofessional and a failure mode that I'd rather avoid.
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