Subject: bug#47431: Process Whois connection broken by remote peer.

From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 12:12:27 +0000

>>>> Possibly with a cache to mitigate the above problem.
>>>
>>> I'd wait with caching until we see a performance problem.  It isn't 
>>> like people are expected to invoke this command many times in a row.
>>
>> I think you misunderstood what I meant.  The idea would be to cache the 
>> replies from the whois.iana.org server, not those of the final whois 
>> server.  IOW, the idea would be to dynamically build a local database 
>> instead of relying on a hard-coded list.
>
> I understand that, and I'm still questioning the need for such a cache.
>
> If you have a cache, you need to manage it: add items that aren't there, 
> delete items no longer pertinent, etc.  Emacs sessions can run for many 
> moons, so the cache will have to be dynamically adjusted.
>

Yes, I know this.

>
> By contrast, requesting the list each time a query is invoked is much 
> easier, so if performance is reasonable, why bother with a cache and 
> risk subtle issues?
>

It's not a performance issue, it's a privacy issue.  Emacs users might not 
want to communicate all their queries to two servers when communicating 
them to a single server is possible.

It might also (but that's not yet clear) be an abuse issue, as Lars 
pointed out.  It's not clear whether the whois.iana.org server is intended 
to be repeatedly queried by whois clients.