I need my site wide cache to never timeout.

I plan to give timeout later when I see a Django that view needs it, and the timeout will be added to that Django view only.

To achieve that I tried to set this setting value:

CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS = None

However, doing that will give me this error:

Internal Server Error: /en-us/blog/
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/aldian/.virtualenv/afcom/lib/python3.7/site-packages/Django-2.2b1-py3.7.egg/django/core/handlers/exception.py", line 34, in inner
    response = get_response(request)
  File "/home/aldian/.virtualenv/afcom/lib/python3.7/site-packages/Django-2.2b1-py3.7.egg/django/utils/deprecation.py", line 96, in __call__
    response = self.process_response(request, response)
  File "/home/aldian/.virtualenv/afcom/lib/python3.7/site-packages/Django-2.2b1-py3.7.egg/django/middleware/cache.py", line 108, in process_response
    patch_response_headers(response, timeout)
  File "/home/aldian/.virtualenv/afcom/lib/python3.7/site-packages/Django-2.2b1-py3.7.egg/django/utils/cache.py", line 241, in patch_response_headers
    if cache_timeout < 0:
TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'int'

Removing CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS from my settings is not an option. Doing that will use the value from django.conf.global_settings.CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS, which is 600 seconds.

So I think the workaround is to set CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS to a very large integer value.

I would like to know from the Django team, was it an intentional design decision to disallow None value from CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS?

If it was by design, it looks contradictory to the fact that we are allowed to put None to cache storage settings timeout:

It would be great if I can see the link to the page explaining the decision.