Follow-up to my analysis on #1543.
Heads up on the shape first: this builds on #1290's poll-loop seams and
github wont let me target a fork branch, so the diff shows its two
commits too. Review only the last commit, the first two are #1290
unchanged, credit to @developer-ishan. Happy to rebase whichever way
#1290 goes, or split differently if that's easier to review.
What it does. pollForToken treats every non-pending answer as terminal,
so one flaky response kills a login the user may already have approved
in the browser. This spends a small grace budget (2 polls) on
incorrect_device_code before giving up, retries 5xx with a growing
backoff, and returns status plus body on other non-200s instead of dying
inside json.Unmarshal on an html error page. Terminal errors now carry
error_description and error_uri, and a timeout that happens after
polling recovered reports a plain timeout, not a stale error from
minutes earlier.
Also honours the interval and expires_in GitHub returns with the device
code (RFC 8628 3.2) instead of hardcoding 5/900, clamped (60s / 3600s)
so a misbehaving response can't stall the CLI or overflow the duration
math.
One thing I changed my mind on from the issue comment: I wrote there
that the client should wait one interval before the first poll. Dropped
that. My own repro test showed 40s of clean polling before authorize, so
the propagation theory doesn't hold, and the grace retry covers the same
window without taxing every fast login. First poll stays immediate,
pinned by a test.
Root cause note: I can't prove the GitHub-side race (cli/cli#9302 is the
same error class but was closed on an unconfirmed "platform race"). So
this isn't claimed as a root-cause fix, it makes the login recoverable
if the condition is transient and diagnosable if it isn't. Btw
incorrect_device_code is a GitHub extension, not an RFC 8628 3.5 code,
so there's no spec retry semantic being violated by the grace polls.
## Test
12 new tests in github_at_device_flow_internal_test.go, all green with
-race (33 in the package). #1290's four tests pass unmodified.
golangci-lint clean in the touched files under both v2.11.4 (this
branch's CI pin) and v2.13.1 (what main pins now).
## AI Disclosure
AI assistance (Claude) was used for issue research and during
development. All changes were reviewed and tested by the author.
Fixes#1543
---------
Co-authored-by: developer-ishan <igupta@groupon.com>
Co-authored-by: Ishan Gupta <62565307+developer-ishan@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: developer-ishan <guptaishan849@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Radoslav Dimitrov <radoslav@stacklok.com>
Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>