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From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Valid date headers
Message-ID: <3539@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 20 Aug 89 03:18:18 GMT
References: <24EDCAF7.144A@drivax.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 33

In article <24EDCAF7.144A@drivax.UUCP> davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) writes:
>I just discovered that C news is posting new articles with a date header
>that looks like:
>
>	Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 13:27:10 GMT
>
>while every other article I receive from outside the system does not contain
>the day of the week preceding the day of the month.

There are a large variety of legal date formats.  Specifically, any date
format acceptable according to RFC822 (the document definining the
format of Internet mail headers) is legit.

inews, rnews, expire, etc. contain a parser (written in yacc) to
understand all legal RFC822 dates.  rn does not, but rn makes no
attempt to parse Date: headers; it's just a uninterpreted string as
far as rn is concerned (no time-based sorting).

>My question:  is this within the limits of valid date headers?

Yes, it's a valid date, and evidently nn is broken.  There is an
official standard; news software should obey the standard.  It's not
enough just to fix nn to handle the day of the week; do the full job.
You don't have to write the code, either.

Grab the file "getdate.y" (first written in 1979; it's as old as the net)
from the news 2.11 distribution (just about every net site will have
this around somewhere) and use it.



-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck