Let's improve IPv6 support

[Chris Hegarty]

On 17/03/17 21:12, Paul Marks wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com> wrote:
>> Google cares a lot about IPv6, and not only because Vint Cerf works at
>> Google.
>>
>> We have some local modifications and some networking expertise and intend to
>> port/contribute that to openjdk10.
>>
>> Most of this is the work of my colleagues Alexander Smundak and Paul Marks.
>>
>> We hope we can do most of this work without asking too much of other net-dev
>> engineers, but we will likely need help with porting to non-Linux platforms,
>> running JPRT, and perhaps CCC/JEP process.
>>
>> We expect to make a large number of commits.  Should there be a JEP to cover
>> this?  Is there a current net-dev engineer who feels they "own" this problem
>> (Chris?)?
>
> I should point out that the current batch of changes are focused on
> support for systems where 127.0.0.1 doesn't exist, which is relatively
> straightforward and unexciting.

Sorry, what does this mean. IPv6-only environment with ::1, or no
loopback mechanism at all?

> However, I'm also aware of three "hard problems" that would require
> new features, and significant changes to current behavior:
> - Address selection: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8170568
> - Default IP address formatting ("0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" vs. RFC 5952)
> - Parsing and formatting of host:port strings, e.g. "[::1]:80"

While a JEP is not strictly needed to add APIs for such, I think
it would be a really useful to go through the process of writing
this stuff up ( which will likely result in a JEP, if not a
JEP-like document ), since there are others that are interested.

-Chris.