Bug: Having multiple HTTPRoute controllers causes Linkerd to constantly emit HTTPRoute Patches

[DerekTBrown]

What is the issue?

• The policy-controller performs periodic reconciliation of HTTPRoute statuses.
• This logic is supposed to only perform a PATCH when the desired .status.parents != the actual .status.parents.
• The logic used to compare the desired and actual state is order-dependent. Thus if statuses from other controllers aren't in the order Linkerd expects, it will PATCH the HTTPRoute.
• This isn't the desired behavior, since the order of elements elements in .status.parents doesn't matter.

How can it be reproduced?

• I have a unit test in the attached PR that reproduces this issue.

Logs, error output, etc

N/A

output of linkerd check -o short

N/A

Environment

Kubernetes: 1.28
Linkerd: Master

Possible solution

No response

Additional context

No response

Would you like to work on fixing this bug?

yes

[DerekTBrown]

Fix/Repro: #13328