Also, it sounds like this server is under your control

I don't think it is - though I could be wrong.
If it is under my control then I'd have to do a bit of research and learning before I could exercise that control.

Back in March I opened a ticket with the company that hosts my website and asked them to mark "all files in (and below) the sisyphusion.tk/ppm directory" as "no-cache".
They replied "Your request has been accomplished".
Of course they don't provide any info regarding exactly what they've done (they never do), but whatever it was didn't make any difference.
Reading various comments/docs about this "no-cache" option I see a lot of "should-do-this" statements and not many "will-do-this" ones.

I think the best solution would be to hack PPM to send a "no-cache" argument. Make that the default behaviour, with an option to allow caching via a command line argument.
PPM itself uses perl's LWP modules: 
C:\>perl -MPPM -le "for(keys(%INC)){print if $_ =~ /LWP/}"
LWP/UserAgent.pm
LWP/MemberMixin.pm
LWP/Simple.pm
LWP.pm
LWP/Protocol.pm

[download]
So, assuming LWP already allows for the passing of the "--no-cache" directive, such a hack might not be too difficult.
In the meantime, running wget --spider --no-cache http://.... is tolerable, if not exactly satisfactory.

Thank you for your reply and link !

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^4: [OT] HTTP downloads and caching by syphilis
in thread [OT] HTTP downloads and caching by syphilis

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