Regarding 8220575: Correctly format test URI's that contain a retrieved IPv6 address

[Daniel Fuchs]

Hi Arthur,

On 13/03/2019 17:43, Arthur Eubanks wrote:
> Martin suggested looping through all available loopback addresses rather 
> than hardcoding them. In that case we'll need helper test functions to 
> return loopback addresses (and test that it actually returns all 
> available loopback addresses).

Though I agree that in a ideal world that's what we would like to do,
I am afraid that this would increase the possibility of getting
random intermittent failures when running our tests on tests farms.
It would certainly increase the opportunity of stumbling on some
bad configuration issues.
Also having several tests running concurrently when one
test binds on the wildcard while another test concurrently binds
on the local host address (or the loopback) is a known recipe for
instability due to the underlying system port reuse strategy.

In addition some of our tests (in httpclient) are already pretty greedy
trying to cover the matrix of http / https / http 1.1 / http 2
multiplied by all the different test cases that the test wants to
test - so running them over all possible loopbacks would probably
become a maintenance hassle:
We already had to split several of them (sometimes a bit
artificially) because they were going over the reasonable
resource quota when run on some exotic configuration
(like fastdebug + Xcomp for instance).

So I'm not sure how feasible such an idea would be.

best regards,

-- daniel