[NNTP] Compressed LIST (and other commands) answers

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> Russ Allbery said:
> > I think a generic command is an interesting idea and definitely better
> > than creating a bunch of new separate commands.
> 
> Given that (bad, IMO) choice, I'd go for a generic command.

A third (probably also bad) option would be to have something like "MODE
COMPRESS" that a client could send, after which the semantics of
multi-line responses would change (i.e. instead of just dot stuffing, 
the server/client would apply a more complex transformation) but all of 
the commands and response codes could stay the same.

 
> > 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?
> 
> I have a vague memory that we discussed this during the development of
> 3977, and decided that this was the direction to go. In additon, TLS
> already does compression, so we don't even need to invent anything.

I agree in princple, but am curious where this stands in terms of SASL 
which should be our long-term framework -- Ken, do you have any thoughts?


> On the other hand, I'm with Ade on this: I'm not convinced that there is
> enough gain to be made from compression to make this worthwhile. If there
> was, we'd see it in other protocols as well and compression would be done
> at the IP layer or below (didn't PEP modems use to compress data
> transparently?).

Hmmm doesn't HTTP have a way to do encryption within the protocol (as a 
content encoding or something?) that is fairly widely used?


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org