ietf-nntp LIST EXTENSIONS non-pipelined and non-cacheable?

[Russ Allbery]

Peter Robinson <pmrobinson at gmx.net> writes:

> Yes.  When it comes to security/privacy, I agree wholeheartedly.  But I
> am thinking of the case of a user using the news server of their
> connectivity provider (IP-based authentication) and posting to Usenet
> (i.e. in public).  If the client only wants to use LIST EXTENSIONS to
> determine whether it can use OVER or HDR, it seems reasonable to cache
> the LIST EXTENSIONS response (for a day or a week maybe) which is
> neither sensitive nor likely to change frequently.  Of course the client
> must be able to cope with those commands failing unexpectedly.

Usually NNTP connections are long-lived, and LIST EXTENSIONS is about as
fast of a command as one can issue since the results are normally
hard-coded into the server.  I'm not sure why anyone would bother caching;
that smells of premature optimization to me.

I suppose that other people have pointed out in the past that the setup
time for NNTP connections already isn't great, but NNTP connections were
really intended to live for the life of the news reading session.

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