Freeform labels

["Tom Petch" <nwnetworks@dial.pipex.com>]

I am confused about freeform labels.  I am not familiar with them from other
contexts and so am not clear how significant they are but ...

(draft-ietf-ccamp-gmpls-)tc-mib under GmplsFreeformLabelTC references RFC3471
which would be a good place to read about them except I can see no mention of
them there.  They appear in tc-mib, lsr-mib and te-mib - they are used as worked
examples which is what attracted my attention - but I cannot find them anywhere
else in the (G)MPLS library.  I think that more description is needed somewhere.

Why does GmplsFreeformLabelTC give size limits of 0 and 64?  Can they really be
0-length?  I have no problem with an SMI object having zero length as long as
the entity being modeled by it can have zero length but is that meaningful here?
And why 64? ok, a lot more than 32-bit but 64 sounds arbitrary (in which case, I
think that worth saying); or does 64 octet relate to some other well known
address formats (IPv6 anyone?).

When GmplsFreeformLabelTC says 'not defined in any RFC',  I think it sums it up
too well:-(

So the use of gmplsFreeformLabel(3) everywhere except in the formal definition
where it appears (I assume) as gmplsFreeformGeneralizedLabel(3) seems about
right as does the descripttion

"The label is any form of label
encoded as an OCTET STRING using
the Textual Convention GmplsFreeformLabel"

Well no, the Textual Convention is GmplsFreeformLabelTC and I would rather say
that the label is encoded using the Textual Convention GmplsFreeformLabelTC
(even though that is a redefinition of an OCTET STRING).

I think more should be said somewhere, ideally in RFC3471, but, more
realistically, in tc-mib.

Tom Petch