Michael: would this be yours to handle?

Simple workaround is to hit "Apply" to refresh the page without selecting anything.

It should appear in the log if logging is set to high enough level - you see an error on the web page all the time.  The issue is that its possible some of the repos go off air for periods of time, you probably don't want logs of log messages in this case.

> Michael: would this be yours to handle?

Is this a bug which needs to be fixed at all?

I would agree that there are several options one could try to work around the problem, it is just that it wasn't intuitive especially for the non-technical user of the interface as what one should do about the presented message.

The error has occurred for me several times, and gone away immediately. Is it possible to attempt retrieval several times before presenting the error message? 

I think I side with Michael on this - lets see if there really is strong feedback on this before doing anything - hopefully Alex can use the workaround above.

We don't want to try more than once as it delays the web page returning - the repos are only fetched when you request the Extension Downloader setting page, so we want to respond to this in a timely fashion.  I think we are better returning an error and displaying the page than retrying.

Has it occured for you for specific urls?

To be honest, I don't remember which ones, and it wasn't in the log by default for me to look back.

I agree that this is not an important feature, and definitely has many workarounds. It definitely does not prevent me from using the product.

Given, that it is a new feature, I wanted to make you aware of the UI problem and describe it for your team.

Perhaps you can just put up an "i" in the future for additional possible explanations to the user. Thanks.

Marking a enhancement, if you feel strongly about this please vote and we will look at it for a future release.