Currently it does just one attempt. And imagine you have kind of not quite stable network and try to download a project with a lot of git submodules. Basically it's a nightmare, you have to try again and again while everything is fetched. There are two problems in fact: 1) git-r3 tries to fetch a git submodule even if a correct revision is already cached 2) It doesn't retry to fetch on connection failure. Reproducible: Always