tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) (04/08/90)
From time to time (a few times a week, to be more specific), I get an error message from B news about an "unparsable date" in an incoming news article. These messages can come from different sites, but the error situation is always this: Expires: 31 Dec 69 23:59:59 GMT The last one I got was from amelia.nas.nasa.gov, I haven't kept track of the earlier ones, unfortunately. So, what I'm wondering is, is this just a bad joke or is it a bug in that site's news software? Obviously, this date has an internal representation of -1L, so I reckon it could be an error return that was used as a date instead of being trapped? -tih -- Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, NHH, Bergen, Norway. Telephone: +47-5-959205 tih@barsoom.nhh.no, thelbekk@norunit.bitnet, edb_tom@debet.nhh.no
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (04/09/90)
In article <766@barsoom.nhh.no> tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) writes: >So, what I'm wondering is, is this just a bad joke or is it a bug in >that site's news software? Obviously, this date has an internal >representation of -1L... It's a bit hard to tell for sure, but probably what is happening is that the expiry date was originally something silly, and a B News site along the way has tried to rewrite it into something sensible and silently failed, with getdate() returning -1 and B News faithfully converting that to an ASCII date. C News does not rewrite headers unnecessarily, so we actually see some of the expiry dates people put in -- things like "when my subscription does". -- Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology Space station @ 8yrs: .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu