=> I agree with nealry everything you said except
for one point I'd like to clarify below. 

  > In general, Tony Hain's arguments are pretty persuasive to 
  > me ... but I
  > am not sure that I would go as far as to prohibit all changes to the
  > label - though the only ones I would allow are where the source has
  > explicitly said that changes are OK (which an initial label of 0, or
  > we could reserve FFFFF for the purpose, could be defined to 
  > do, and some
  > flow state setup mechanism could also do).

=> Fully agree with this and all of Tony's comments on 
this thread. 
One point I'd like to clarify here is my suggestion that 
some other part of the stack (other than the application). 
can set the flow label.

The reason I suggested that (and I do think it's different
from having it set by the router) is that I've been looking
at some mobility scenarios in which a multihomed IPv6 MN 
can direct it's inbound traffic to certain interfaces
based on some internal policies (QoS, cost, BW ...etc
on each interface) using MIPv6 signalling. 
So in this case, if you end up with an application that
doesn't support the flow label or simply doesn't
care, it might still be a good idea to set the flow 
by another function in the IPv6 stack to be able
to identify the flow when signalling to the CN
or HA. 
So to be very clear, I was suggesting that for
cases where the applications have not set the flow
label, AND the host requires an e2e immutable
value. 

  > 
  > Also, everyone please note, just in case it isn't already 
  > clear.  When
  > anyone says the field needs to be immutable (in this case 
  > anyway), it
  > isn't (really) because anyone cares what value is delivered to the
  > recipient node - it is that we want to know what value will 
  > be observed as
  > the packet passes through each routing domain along the 
  > path.   That's
  > important.  It just happens that this is equivalent to 
  > saying that the
  > field must not be modified (perhaps with some specific exceptions).

=> Agreed. But some of the cases I've looked into would
require the end node (as well as routers along the
path) to verify the validity of the flow label. 
This is an addition to what you say and doesn't 
contradict it. 

Without some sort of semi secured flow label, the 
mutability requirement seems like a gentlemen's
agreement :)
The problem is that this is not verifiable, which
is why I see a benefit in using some hash function
to generate it. 

Hesham
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