TestVSCode_coreFile looks for an exe/core file in the same directory as the test. It first calls realpath, but I don't think it's necessary. Using realpath prevents this test from working when run as part of a build system that uses content-addressed-storage, i.e. all the files might all be symlinks in the same directory pointing to files in different directories elsewhere. If some amount of normalization is needed, maybe os.path.normpath() would be useful, although I wouldn't see why that's needed either.
(This is a fairly trivial patch, but I'm mailing it to see if there is a reason we need to keep realpath, and if so, if there's some other workaround we can do).