[NNTP] Compressed LIST (and other commands) answers

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Is it best to have new commands?

>  ZHDR LZMA BASE64 Injection-Info 1-
>  ZLIST LZMA BASE64 ACTIVE
>  ZOVER LZMA BASE64 1-
>  ZTAKETHIS LZMA NONE 123 <valid at mid>

> or a generic one (name to be defined) like:

>  ZCOMMAND LZMA BASE64 0 HDR Injection-Info 1-
>  ZCOMMAND LZMA BASE64 0 LIST ACTIVE
>  ZCOMMAND LZMA BASE64 0 OVER 1-
>  ZCOMMAND LZMA NONE 123 TAKETHIS <valid at mid>

I think a generic command is an interesting idea and definitely better
than creating a bunch of new separate commands.

Although I wonder if, at that point, whether we want to just provide some
facility negotiate compression of all subsequent traffic on the NNTP
connection.  In other words, rather than treating this on a
command-by-command basis, what if we model it after STARTTLS?  It has the
advantage of simplicity of description, but it has the serious drawback
that it's another data layer, and I know from SASL and TLS that managing
layers can be a huge pain and it's very easy to do it poorly.

> Could we imagine to have a IANA registry for that? (GZIP, LZMA, LZMA2,
> YENC, BASE64, etc.)

There sort of is one already for the HTTP Content-Coding header, but it
only specifies compress, gzip/deflate, and something called pack200-gzip
which is apparently used with Java.  It seems like a reasonable IANA
registry to me.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>