Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!world!geoff From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer) Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews. Message-ID: <1991Jun3.193631.17665@world.std.com> Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center References: <1991May23.115029.10971@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991May28.232833.22503@world.std.com> <1991Jun3.105621.23764@eua.ericsson.se> Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1991 19:36:31 GMT Lines: 29 Per Hedeland: >Well, mail2news isn't an *alternative* to inews (the default config is >for it to call inews), but perhaps mail2news + relaynews is? Soo, how >does mail2news (now the "officially" sanctioned way of gatewaying mail >to C news:-) deal with the Date: line in the mails? - It uses getdate! >And if even getdate fails, it uses the current date!! (Shudder...:-) Well, I did say mail2news is *supposed* to be good at gatewaying. I haven't yet examined the code myself. In the mean time, another candidate for mail-to-news gateway has appeared. I'm not going to say anything more about it until I *have* examined it. >As I said, I don't claim they are valid, the point is a) that they were >acceptable to all the mailers they passed through, These dates were probably "acceptable" to the mailers they passed through only because they weren't parsed by those mailers. >... and b) that getdate *did* make some sense of them (as has been pointed >out before, it doesn't matter if the result is a few hours wrong, that's >exactly what happens when e.g. getabsdate ignores unknown timezones). Right, a few hours off wouldn't matter, but getdate can be be off by *centuries*. E.g. "getdate 'may 23 2100'" yields 675046800, which is "Thu May 23 21:00:00 1991" because getdate *knows*, by ghod, that no years after 1999 are valid. That does matter. At the very least, relaynews will toss an article whose date is off by centuries. -- Geoff Collyer world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff