R definition hangs and can't find repo

[bamurtaugh]

• VSCode Version: Version: 1.60.0-insider (user setup)
  Commit: e7d7e9a9348e6a8cc8c03f877d39cb72e5dfb1ff
  Date: 2021-09-01T10:40:58.134Z
  Electron: 13.1.8
  Chrome: 91.0.4472.164
  Node.js: 14.16.0
  V8: 9.1.269.39-electron.0
  OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22000
• Local OS Version: Windows 11
• Reproduces in: Remote-Containers (haven't tried to repro in Codespaces)
• Name of Dev Container Definition with Issue: R https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/main/containers/r

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Add R definition to project
2. Reopen in container to build image
3. Build takes 5-10 minutes, then hangs and errors out

Seems like the relevant part is "Cannot find repo ManuelHentschel/vscDebugger" - I can see this repo is part of the Dockerfile: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main/containers/r/.devcontainer/Dockerfile#L36 and the repo still exists on GitHub (https://github.com/ManuelHentschel/vscDebugger), but I also see where this repo was added/changed in the Dockerfile as part of the recent PR.

@eitsupi @kmehant Please let me know your thoughts, thank you!

[eitsupi]

As you can see in the error message displayed in the terminal, the access to api.github.com seems to have timed out.
Does this happen over and over again? Since this command alone constitutes the layer, I think that the second build will either give an error immediately or the build will be completed immediately.
(The first build takes about 10 minutes because it takes a long time to build the layers before this command.)

I just tried it and it built without any problems. I also looked at the issues of the remotes package used to install the package from github repo, but there are not many similar reports, so the cause that comes to my mind is a temporary communication failure.

[bamurtaugh]

It happens consistently. @chrisdias tried this over two different days, and ran into the problem twice.

I just tried building the same project again that had failed from the screenshot, and after ~7 minutes got the same error:

I clicked "Retry" and it seems to have worked now:

But as an end user, after waiting up to 10 minutes for that initial error, I wouldn't be inclined to click "Retry" (Chris and I weren't when we ran into this). What can we do to mitigate that initial error?

[eitsupi]

Do you think it could be due to restricted access to the GitHub API?
In other words, this session is anonymous access, but is there a lot of other token-based access that could be the cause?

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/overview/resources-in-the-rest-api#rate-limiting

[eitsupi]

I just tried building the same project again that had failed from the screenshot, and after ~7 minutes got the same error:

I'm sorry, I wasn't sure exactly if the layer cache was used in the build with Remote-Containers.

But as an end user, after waiting up to 10 minutes for that initial error, I wouldn't be inclined to click "Retry" (Chris and I weren't when we ran into this). What can we do to mitigate that initial error?

I can only think of commenting out the installation command that is causing it.

@ManuelHentschel @renkun-ken Any idea?

[Chuxel]

Yeah rate limiting on api.github.com can be very difficult to predict In a cloud environment - particularly anonymous like you'd see in a Dockerfile (which lowers limits). IPs get reused, so you can hit situations where it stops working. I generally try to avoid their use because of it in favor of other techniques. I even use the git CLI to do things like finding release tags to stay away from the APIs at scale (e.g. git ls-remote --tags)

[eitsupi]

Thank you for your suggestion.
It seems that we can get the latest tag without the GitHub API with the following command, so I would like to update the Dockerfile to use this.

$ git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/ManuelHentschel/vscDebugger | tail -n 1 | cut --delimiter='/' --fields=3
v0.4.7