Re: [NNTP] NNTP Compression

Julien ÉLIE wrote:
> Hi Ken,
> 
>> Below is the spec that the Lemonade WG did for IMAP and I think 
>> something similar would work for NNTP.  This could work for 
>> Client->Server traffic and/or Peer->Peer traffic.  I'd be willing to 
>> write up an I-D if folks think it would be useful.  Cyrus IMAP and 
>> Mozilla T-Bird v3 both support it and it works great.
>>
>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4978
> 
> I think it would be useful to have a similar capability for NNTP.
> 
> 
> As it was noted in the previous discussion, clients may want to
> use compression only for a few commands.  Wouldn't it be wise
> to have an NNTP command that can both activate and deactivate
> the compression?

I don't think its worth the trouble.  A client could just open another 
NNTP session without activating COMPRESSion.


> I see that RFC 4978 (COMPRESS for IMAP) defines strategies
> to find out incompressible attachments but it may not always
> be possible to be sure we do not have to compress (yEnc articles,
> base64 articles, etc.).  So maybe clients may want to retrieve
> articles always uncompressed? 

There are strategies to both determine if the compression level should 
be set to zero (for JPEG, GZIP, etc) attachments, and to reset the 
dictionary (OVER response looks much different from multi-line BODY 
response).

-- 
Kenneth Murchison
Systems Programmer
Carnegie Mellon University