e2e: Retry transient theme activation failures in pages spec

[jorgefilipecosta]

What?

Fixes the flaky pages site-editor e2e test reported in #74483.

Why?

The test itself isn't the problem — it intermittently fails in its beforeAll/afterAll hooks while activating a theme:

Error: apiRequestContext.get: socket hang up
  - → GET http://localhost:8889/wp-admin/themes.php
  at RequestUtils.activateTheme (.../request-utils/themes.ts:13:36)
  at .../pages.spec.js:88:22

socket hang up is a Node ECONNRESET — the server occasionally drops the connection under CI load. activateTheme issues raw request.get() calls with no retry, so a single dropped connection fails the whole describe.

How?

Wrap the activateTheme() calls in the spec's hooks with a small local retry helper. It retries only on the transient socket hang up / ECONNRESET error (up to 3 attempts) and rethrows any other error immediately, so genuine failures (e.g. a missing theme) still surface right away.

The fix is intentionally scoped to this spec rather than the shared themes.ts util.

Testing Instructions

• Run npm run test:e2e -- test/e2e/specs/site-editor/pages.spec.js and confirm it passes.
• The transient failure is load-dependent and won't reliably reproduce locally; the change adds the retry path around the call that fails in CI.

Fixes #74483

[github-actions]

The following accounts have interacted with this PR and/or linked issues. I will continue to update these lists as activity occurs. You can also manually ask me to refresh this list by adding the props-bot label.

If you're merging code through a pull request on GitHub, copy and paste the following into the bottom of the merge commit message.

Co-authored-by: jorgefilipecosta <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Mamaduka <[email protected]>

To understand the WordPress project's expectations around crediting contributors, please review the Contributor Attribution page in the Core Handbook.

[github-actions]

Size Change: 0 B

Total Size: 8.59 MB

_{compressed-size-action}

[github-actions]

Flaky tests detected in cf49c0d.
Some tests passed with failed attempts. The failures may not be related to this commit but are still reported for visibility. See the documentation for more information.

🔍 Workflow run URL: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/actions/runs/27464950672
📝 Reported issues:

• [Flaky Test] Should save the changes #78689 in /test/e2e/specs/editor/plugins/wp-editor-meta-box.spec.js