Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!psuvax1!news From: flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews. Message-ID: Date: 23 May 91 07:43:49 GMT References: <1991Apr25.223301.27280@world.std.com> <1991May16.211311.3544@eua.ericsson.se> <1991May23.024533.9731@world.std.com> <1991May23.035202.31699@mp.cs.niu.edu> Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State Computer Science Lines: 36 Nntp-Posting-Host: dictionopolis.cs.psu.edu > If substituting the current date is a bad idea, what would you think >is a better idea? If a news site rewrites the Date field, it has suddenly created a different article. Rewriting a header is not a trivial action! Any change made to an article creates a different article. Given the size of Usenet, this could happen thousands of times, creating thousands of different versions of the article. Different articles logically require different Message-IDs. If you don't give them different Message-IDs, then I have no assurance that article on my site is the same as on your site. You might think, we don't need network-wide consistency. Well, I've just created a news gateway that translates all articles to pig-latin while keeping the same Message-ID. Do you mind? You might think, rewriting the Date field is a trivial change that doesn't affect the substance of the article. Well, I've just created another news gateway that always changes the Date to something random. Do you care? I certainly do. I believe in high-fidelity. Rewriting articles is wrong. If you cannot deliver the article intact, don't deliver it at all. Understanding the Date field is a prerequisite for delivering the article, because the Date is used to reject articles that are too old. Here's a hypothetical. Site X rewrites the date into "MMM-DD-YYYY". Site Y rewrites the date into "DD MMM YYYY". X doesn't understand Y's format, and vice-versa. Each site replaces unparsable dates with the current date. If there is a long enough cycle in the network that includes X and Y, then X and Y will shuttle the same articles back and forth forever, continually updating the date. -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu