Offending fragments of code, in pulseaudio-0.9.15/src/tests/ipacl-test.c: fd = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); assert(fd >= 0); sa.sin_family = AF_INET; sa.sin_port = htons(22); sa.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr("127.0.0.1"); r = connect(fd, (struct sockaddr*) &sa, sizeof(sa)); assert(r >= 0); and #ifdef HAVE_IPV6 fd = socket(PF_INET6, SOCK_STREAM, 0); assert(fd >= 0); memset(&sa6, 0, sizeof(sa6)); sa6.sin6_family = AF_INET6; sa6.sin6_port = htons(22); pa_assert_se(inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::1", &sa6.sin6_addr) == 1); r = connect(fd, (struct sockaddr*) &sa6, sizeof(sa6)); assert(r >= 0); (IPv6 is always enabled by the pulseaudio ebuild as far as I can see) Probably easiest to just disable this test, the same way as mix-test and resampler-test are already. I haven't tried 0.9.17, but looking at the code, it appears as if the IPv6 issue has been fixed, but it still requires sshd.
Not going to backport the ipv6 fixes for now.
Then why not disable the test? The fact is that the stable version fails tests under what I would assume to be a fairly common configuration. And that's before considering the sshd-related failure.