Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Our friend, the GMT date.
Message-ID: <1989Dec4.173315.22862@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4364@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <14810@well.UUCP> <1989Dec3.210413.27043@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 89 17:33:15 GMT

In article <1989Dec3.210413.27043@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes:
>B news (2.11.19 and earlier) will parse the Date: header and rewrite
>it as GMT....
>TMNN does rewrite the date, but won't put "31 Dec 69"...

For the sake of completeness, C News's behavior should be mentioned.
We have religious objections to gratuitous header rewriting, and don't
do it.  The current relaynews doesn't even notice the Date header, since
it tries to notice as few headers as possible.

>...The RFC defines a valid date as something 822-ish that
>getdate will accept, an operational definition not terribly useful to
>un-Unix news implementers.

C'mon now, be fair.  The RFC does say that, but it also supplies an example
of a format that definitely is acceptable to both, and warns against a few
that aren't.
-- 
Mars can wait:  we've barely   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
started exploring the Moon.    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu