nested variant records query

[jm@bbn.com (John Morrison)]

In a bit of communications software, we may need to nest variant
records.  Has anybody gotten this to work?  It seems that our system
(we're on an R1000) insists that the inner variant record must be
constrained.  If you ask me, that's not much of a variant record.

This has been so nasty, that we are now wondering if we're not looking
at the problem incorrectly.  In other words, are variant records the
right (only?) way to do packet i/o?  Anybody else had this problem?

It would crop up in the IP layer of the DoD protocol stack if you were
doing 802.3 link-layer with at least one other protocol stack as well.
The first discriminant would be the 802.3 length (HA!) field, and the
second would be IP protocol field.



John Morrison

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