[NNTP] Compressed LIST (and other commands) answers

[Clive D.W. Feather]

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.

> 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.

> 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.

True.

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?).

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
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