I found a situation when chef had generated Chef::Exceptions::CommandTimeout exception in git clone command if time of git clone is more than 600 seconds (10 minutes). Here's how to set the timeout value for such situations in chef recipe.

recipe.rb

# monkey-patch Chef Git Provider
# to raise the default ShellOut timeout setting
# because this repo can take over 10min
# to clone from github.com
class ::Chef::Provider::Git
  def clone # based on opscode/chef commit b86c5b06
    converge_by("clone from #{@new_resource.repository} into #{@new_resource.destination}") do
      remote = @new_resource.remote

      args = []
      args << "-o #{remote}" unless remote == 'origin'
      args << "--depth #{@new_resource.depth}" if @new_resource.depth

      timeout = 10000 # i believe these are seconds

      Chef::Log.info "#{@new_resource} cloning repo #{@new_resource.repository} to #{@new_resource.destination} with timeout #{timeout}"

      clone_cmd = "git clone #{args.join(' ')} #{@new_resource.repository} #{Shellwords.escape @new_resource.destination}"
      shell_out!(clone_cmd, run_options(:log_level => :info, :timeout => timeout))
    end
  end
end

see also:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14557118/how-to-set-a-timeout-in-deploy-revision-provider
http://community.opscode.com/chat/chef/2012-03-12 search "timeout"
https://github.com/opscode/mixlib-shellout/blob/master/lib/mixlib/shellout.rb#L278
https://github.com/opscode/mixlib-shellout/blob/master/lib/mixlib/shellout/unix.rb#L63
https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/git.rb#L152

Thanks very much for this. I took this sample code and overrode spawn_command_thread() in https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/service/windows.rb to increase the timeout to Windows service star, stop, restart, etc. events.