libgdata currently doesn't automatically retry any operations if they fail. However, for transient failures (e.g. 5xx errors) libgdata could easily implement exponential backoff and retry 5 times before returning the failure to the user. This would save implementing retry handling in clients.

Note that care would have to be taken that retries are performed safely for state-changing operations.

See https://developers.google.com/google-apps/documents-list/#implementing_exponential_backoff for a suggested implementation (Google Documents-specific, but could be applied to all of libgdata).