Opening Up Xdr

[Craig Milo Rogers <Rogers@ISI.EDU>]

	I'm writing Java tools to help me monitor the ANTS-2.0
permanent topology(s) in the ABone.  The first test I'm implementing
is to check whether an edge node can connect to a core node using the
ANTS-2.0 flavor of DANTE.

	I build the JOIN packet and process any reponse packet
inside a monitoring program that runs outside the ANTS environment for
various prosaic reasons (it also monitors Anetd and ASP, for instance).
Nonetheless, sharing some key code with ANTS might improve the long-term
maintainability of the monitoring code.

	In particular, I'd like to use ants.core.Xdr to perform data
serialization and deserialization for my ANTS probe.  However, I don't
want to have to precompute the lengths of serialized data, as ANTS
does: while precomputing the serialized lengths may lead to runtime
efficiency, I think it's a greater burden to long-term code
maintainence.

	Please consider making the following methods public:

ants.core.Xdr.index()

ants.core.Xdr.getBytes()

					Craig Milo Rogers