My dev team was committed a versioning tool based on Subversion to run on Windows (our svn client is sliksvn).

We're developing with Delphi XE2, should that matter.

We're asked to implement a "check for updates availability" feature, which has to work as follows:

1. Connect to the SVN repo via svn+ssh protocol;
2. See if there are changes to receive and list them;
3. Let the user decide if he wants to receive changes or not.

We don't have a great knowledge on svn, so we thought to implement that thing client side by a certain number of CreateProcess calls that wrap directly proper svn commands.

Anyways what we perceived is that if network problems should arise, such like a connection drop, svn client hangs forever waiting for the operation to close instead of failing for timeout.

We know that CreateProcess can be given a timeout argument, but it wouldn't be correct to use it, as we can't know from outside how long will be the svn operation taking to complete.

Is there any way to avoid that deadlock?