Re: wininet: let automated testers force all DNS lookups to return localhost

[Rob Shearman]

2008/10/31 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>:
> The public internet can (and does) go pear-shaped
> in the middle of test runs, which means any test
> that tries to access the public internet is de facto
> flaky, even if it tries to protect itself by skipping
> if the internet is down.
>
> So let's provide a way for automated testers to
> force all hostname resolution requests to
> return the same result (say, 'localhost' or 'mytestserver').
> Only include this in debugging builds.
>
> Later we should provide a script to set up
> a local test server that can handle all of
> our conformance tests' requests, but for
> now, just letting patchwatcher or winetest
> redirect everything to localhost will let tests
> fail reliably instead of randomly.
> See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15716

This approach won't help users of the Wine conformance tests running
on Windows, so it appears to me to be a flawed approach. We should
instead rewrite any existing tests that use a public server to instead
use a server started by the Wine test code (see
dlls/wininet/tests/http.c:server_thread). This has the additional
benefit of allowing us to be much more precise with what we're testing
and to be able to emulate the implementations of different HTTP
servers, instead of just what winehq.org runs.

-- 
Rob Shearman