Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Strange messages from B news expire
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.154543.23887@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4793@borabora.omni.com> <502@ctycal.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 90 15:45:43 GMT

In article <502@ctycal.UUCP> ingoldsb@ctycal.UUCP (Terry Ingoldsby) writes:
>>   Oct 11 03:53    news    expire: : Unparsable date "184482407"
>
>We've been getting some peculiar messages about Unparsable dates
>at this site, too.  I think I've seen the above format; I've also
>seen dates that look slightly more legit, but have 69 as the year.

As I think I mentioned before, the all-numeric date is from a C-News-format
history file, which is now available (an option?) with B News.  The 1969
dates are the result of someone's software ill-advisedly attempting to
convert `-1' -- the error return from getdate() -- back into an ASCII date.
Since Unix dates are relative to the start of 1970 GMT, converting -1 back
to ASCII typically gives 31 Dec 1969 with a (local) time a few hours before
midnight.

>Also, are there any problems between B and C news.  We (a B news
>site) get news from a C news site.  The C news administrator gets
>oodles of messages on some days...

There are lots of interoperating B and C sites without such problems, in
fact it's the first I've heard of something like that happening.
-- 
The type syntax for C is essentially   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
unparsable.             --Rob Pike     |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry