Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!well!jef
From: jef@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Is anyone interested in putting local time in the "Date:" header?
Message-ID: <14749@well.UUCP>
Date: 28 Nov 89 19:51:34 GMT
Reply-To: Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us>
Organization: Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, Ada Lovelace Cabal
Lines: 31

I'll be posting patches to add a checksum header sometime soon, but
meanwhile here's something else to discuss.  News articles currently
put GMT in the "Date:" header.  This may even be required by the news
RFC, I don't know.  It is obviously not required by the mail RFC that
the news one is built on.  But RFC or no RFC, it seems to me that it
would be better if the date were in the local time at the originating
machine.  The reasoning is twofold:

1) It's easy to go from local times to GMT, but it's impossible to go
from GMT to the appropriate local time since you don't know which one
is appropriate.  Thus if people started posting in local time but someone
absolutely had to see GMT, he could easily modify his newsreaders to
parse the date field and convert.  In other words, it doesn't break
anything (too badly).

2) Displaying the time in GMT is of limited utility - the only reason
for it that I can think of is to enable a human to tell the posting
order of a set of messages, but who does that kind of thing manually?
On the other hand, displaying local time would be very useful.  In
local-distribution newsgroups, there is no reason to use anything
else.  In world-wide newsgroups, local time might tell you that a
message was posted at 4 in the morning, explaining its lack of
coherence.

Am I missing anything, or should I go ahead and post the patches?
Just as with checksumming, I expect this to be completely optional.
---
Jef

  Jef Poskanzer  jef@well.sf.ca.us  {ucbvax, apple, hplabs}!well!jef
  "Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." -- Friedrich Nietzsche