Retry test VS Code acquisition and propagate failures

[Sean McManus (sean-mcmanus)]

Summary

Retry transient test VS Code acquisition failures with bounded backoff, and make terminal installation failures fail the acquisition command instead of surfacing later as missing native binaries. This is an independent follow-up to the failed Linux acquisition job observed during #14751; the retry passed on unchanged source.

This PR was investigated and created by GitHub Copilot (in VS Code). Any message starting with ✨Copilot: was sent by Copilot.

Changes

• Retry raw transient network failures, including aggregate connection errors and test-electron request timeouts, up to three attempts with 1-second and 2-second backoffs.
• Preserve the pinned VS Code version, cache location, platform selection, and the library's existing archive retries. Its terminal archive-download error is not retried again.
• Propagate installation failures through the existing script error handler so the CLI exits nonzero without installing the extension or copying binaries.
• Add a script-owned regression suite and run it before native-binary acquisition in the reusable CI workflow.
• Normalize the touched workflow to consistent CRLF line endings, correcting its pre-existing mixed LF/CRLF formatting.

Validation

• yarn test-vscode-acquisition: 21 tests passed, including actual CLI entry-point tests with mocked HTTPS failures and delays.
• Targeted ESLint: passed.
• Workflow YAML, acquisition-step ordering, unchanged parsed YAML after line-ending normalization, and CRLF-aware whitespace checks: passed.
• Strict script-project typecheck: five pre-existing diagnostics remain, compared with seven on main; no new diagnostics introduced. Full platform integration tests will run in CI.

[Copilot]

🟢 Approval recommended

The bounded retry behavior and failure propagation are narrowly scoped and comprehensively tested.

Pull request overview

Adds bounded retries for transient VS Code acquisition failures and ensures terminal failures exit nonzero.

Changes:

• Retries transient network failures with exponential backoff.
• Propagates installation failures to the CLI error handler.
• Adds acquisition regression tests to CI.

File summaries

File	Description
Extension/package.json	Registers the acquisition test script.
Extension/.scripts/vscode.ts	Implements retries and failure propagation.
Extension/.scripts/vscode.test.mjs	Tests retry and CLI failure behavior.
Extension/.scripts/installAndCopyBinaries.ts	Removes obsolete undefined-result handling.
.github/workflows/job-compile-and-test.yml	Runs acquisition tests before binary acquisition.

Review details

• Files reviewed: 5/5 changed files
• Comments generated: 0
• Review effort level: Balanced

---

💡 Add a code-review agent skill or configure MCP servers for context-aware, tailored reviews. Learn more in the docs.