The "retry-on-connect" problem almost looks to be solved on each TCP-oriented database driver. However, retries are often hard-coded (e.g. db_mysql/dbase.c +300), or not even implemented at all (db_mysql/my_con.c +109).
Since this is really a common corner-case scenario for any backend, it would be nice to simply have a global parameter which dictates the number of attempted connect operations, regardless of the backend.