[NNTP] Compressed LIST (and other commands) answers

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Russ,

>> 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.

All right.


> 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.

Another drawback would be that one would for instance want compressed
LIST ACTIVE and OVER results but not compressed ARTICLE, POST or IHAVE
results because articles (binaries) are already compressed and it would
mean to compress+encode already compressed+encoded articles...  Whence
a loss of performance and compression.


>> 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.

OK, I see it here <http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters>.

I also see for PGP:
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/pgp-parameters/pgp-parameters.xhtml#pgp-parameters-15>
(with zip, zlib and bzip2).

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Je suis adroit de la main gauche et je suis gauche de la main droite. » (Raymond Devos)