[gentoo-user] How do I make connection attempts in Git timeout sooner?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

With overlays.gentoo.org being down, by update script takes a long time 
to complete. Instead of Git telling me immediately that it can't connect 
to the server, it just sits there for whole minutes doing nothing before 
it decides to abort.

This is extremely frustrating. Is there a way to change this behavior of 
Git? Other software doesn't seem to have this problem (for example if I 
browse to a web server that's down, the browser immediately tells me 
that it can't connect, rather going for a coffee break first.)