That's me. I never said to make all messages fixed length. I said to make a fixed number of fields per protocol. So given a protocol version number, you know the number of fields in a message. This is not only easier for parsing messages, but just good practice. I don't see why a 1 byte flag needs to be optional anyway.

From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
To: Turkey Breast <turkeybreast@yahoo.com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 9:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Missing fRelayTxes in version message

It's not a bug (although there was recently a change to make bitcoind/qt always send this field anyway). 

I don't know where Amir is going with BIP 60. Version messages have always been variable length. There's nothing inherent in the Bitcoin protocol that says all messages are fixed length, indeed, tx messages are allowed to have arbitrary data appended after them that gets relayed.


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Turkey Breast <turkeybreast@yahoo.com> wrote:
See this BIP. I'm not sure if this is a bug or what, but it would be good if messages always had a fixed number of fields per protocol version.


This BIP details everything that needs to be done and proposes a protocol upgrade.

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