As a user, I'd like to be able to add also physical ports to VPLS, and not only interfaces

The reason why this requirement should be satisfied is that different users that would like to deploy ONOS currently use CORSA switches, that do virtualization on the switch.

A typical user would create (form the physical switch) different virtual switches - called from corsa virtual contexts.

Each virtual context can be connected to a different controller.
Each virtual context can have one or more ports.

Physical ports can be bound to virtual context ports 1:1 (meaning that all the traffic that comes in from the physical port goes is forwarded to a specific virtual port on a virtual context).

Physical ports can also be sliced. A specific traffic pattern can be forwarded to a specific virtual context. For example, all the traffic coming on physical port 1, with VLAN Id 100 could be forwarded to a possible virtual context 1, port 1. Virtual context 1 would see the incoming traffic as untagged. Just in the same way, when traffic that goes out from the virtual port of the virtual context, it is tagged again with the VLAN.
The CORSA box maintains the mapping and takes care of encapsulation and decapsulation.

In any case, ONOS sees a virtual context only as a normal switch, without being aware of the internal physical/virtual port mapping.

Using VLANs from VPLS at this point would be useless (and redundant).

In order to support this scenario is better to be able to connect also physical ports, without using VLANs.

David Whittaker Carolina Fernandez