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From: per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews.
Message-ID: <1991May28.124010.6660@eua.ericsson.se>
Date: 28 May 91 12:40:10 GMT
References: <b8bHel-b@cs.psu.edu> <1991May23.115029.10971@mp.cs.niu.edu> <91May23.151914edt.1030@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> <1991May24.032746.1237@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991May24.050525.9055@world.std.com>
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In article <1991May24.050525.9055@world.std.com>, geoff@world.std.com
(Geoff Collyer) writes:
|> I think we can cope with the mailers.

|> getabsdate can parse pretty much any unambiguous absolute date, including
|> some that getdate can't parse or misunderstands; see libc/getabsdate.3
|> for details.

Well, my main problem (like, I gather, Neil Rickert's) is indeed with
mail gatewayed to news (via inews - and if this is a "bad idea" please
suggest alternatives - given the discussions here, I can't really see
relaynews being it).

Here are a couple of real-life dates that inews as previously described
rewrote to "the epoch" - I certainly don't claim that they are "valid",
but even the outdated getdate that comes with C news makes *some* sense
of them (getabsdate didn't, obviously), and they did occur in a mailing
list with world-wide distribution:

Date: 16 May 1991 1547-PDT (Thursday)

Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:28:36+010

I suppose the best way to deal with this is to use a package like Rich
$alz' newsgate, which aggressively makes sure that headers are in
"standard" form before passing them on to news (looking inside mail2news
should give the "headers are sanctified" proponents heartburn:-).

The C news contrib stuff, on the other hand, which is often at least
mentioned by C news authours in this context, does nothing of the kind -
Date: is passed verbatim to inews, with effect as above.

--Per Hedeland
per@erix.ericsson.se  or
per%erix.ericsson.se@sunic.sunet.se  or
...uunet!erix.ericsson.se!per