Re: Grouping of sub attributes in seperate VSAs

With the current code you'll get alike SubTLVs occurring consecutively in the packed VSA/TLV attribute so you'd end up with one of those two variations.

The reason why this happens is the encoder performs a merge sort on the attribute list prior to attempting to encode the attributes. This makes efficient packing of SubTLV attributes into VSAs/TLVs much easier, because you can just look at the next attribute to see if it's in the same parent TLV, or see if there's a common nesting level.

Because merge sort is a stable sort, you should find the ordering of attributes of the same number and lineage don't change.

Arran many thanks for your explanation.