Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!world!geoff From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews. Message-ID: <1991May28.232833.22503@world.std.com> Date: 28 May 91 23:28:33 GMT Article-I.D.: world.1991May28.232833.22503 References: <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> <1991May28.124010.6660@eua.ericsson.se> Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center Lines: 42 Per Hedeland: >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). Rich Salz's mail2news is supposed to be quite good at this. inews is currently really too slow for this job and isn't really intended for 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but even the outdated getdate that comes with C news makes *some* sense 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) getabsdate knows nothing about RFC 822 comments (or other extraneous tokens) and expects times of day to contain colons. (Note that getdate will usually claim it parsed any given date-like string, but it doesn't always get it right. For example, it can confuse year and time of day(!).) >Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:28:36+010 Sorry, I don't know what this means, so there's little chance of getabsdate understanding it. Does it mean Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:28:36 +0100 or Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:28:36 +0010 or even Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:28:36 +1000 Time zones need to be separated from other strings in the date. Gluing them on to the end of some other nearby token won't work. Numeric time zones should be four digits long and signed. There's really no need for all the cleverness we see exhibited in Date: headers. RFCs 822 and 1122/1123 describe a fairly simple date format, and for news, you mainly need to just omit 822 comments. -- Geoff Collyer world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff