Gaia timeouts affecting imports

[Theodlz]

Hi,

This line is causing issues: https://github.com/astropy/astroquery/blob/main/astroquery/gaia/core.py#L1190. What happens is that in the same file where GaiaClass is defined, it's instantiated as Gaia. However when the Gaia servers are down / timing out, this means that just importing code from that file can take > 30 seconds. This can be a big issue as relying on astroquery.gaia as a dependency can affect your codebase as a whole, slowing things down a lot.

It would be best if these classes were not instantiated in the same file as they are defined, to avoid breaking/slowing imports.

[keflavich]

This is a design-level choice across the astroquery project, and we won't be changing that specific line.

However, you've identified a legitimate problem - instantiating a class should not perform any remote calls. This is a bug.