davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) (08/20/89)
I just discovered that C news is posting new articles with a date header
that looks like:
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 13:27:10 GMT
while every other article I receive from outside the system does not contain
the day of the week preceding the day of the month. I assume this is because
my B news feed is massaging the headers to remove the day of the week from
other C news site postings before passing them on to me, not because no other
site is using the default C news handling of the date header.
My question: is this within the limits of valid date headers?
The reason I ask, is that nn's date parser does not correctly handle anything
outside of [D]D Mmm YY hh:mm:ss GMT, which causes some minor mis-ordering of
articles withing a particular menu. I was wondering if we should enforce a
rigid or flexible date header? It would be trivial to change C news to
omit the day of the week, and it is almost as trivial to change nn to
handle the extra field.
I am currently modifying nn's pack_date.c to handle an optional day of the
week, plus time zones other than GMT. The reason for the extra time zones
is to properly handle the breaking up of digests -- most of the sub-articles I
have seen in digests have a date header that has both the day of the week and
a non-GMT time zone. I'll send the result to Kim Storm for him to mull over.
--
Wayne Davison \ /| / /| \/ /| /(_) davison@drivax.UUCP
(_)/ |/ /\| / / |/ \ ...!amdahl!drivax!davisonhenry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/20/89)
In article <24EDCAF7.144A@drivax.UUCP> davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) writes: >I just discovered that C news is posting new articles with a date header >that looks like: > > Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 13:27:10 GMT > >while every other article I receive from outside the system does not contain >the day of the week preceding the day of the month... > >My question: is this within the limits of valid date headers? Yes. RFC1036 explicitly blesses this format in particular, in fact. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (08/20/89)
In article <24EDCAF7.144A@drivax.UUCP> davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) writes: >I just discovered that C news is posting new articles with a date header >that looks like: > > Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 13:27:10 GMT > >while every other article I receive from outside the system does not contain >the day of the week preceding the day of the month. There are a large variety of legal date formats. Specifically, any date format acceptable according to RFC822 (the document definining the format of Internet mail headers) is legit. inews, rnews, expire, etc. contain a parser (written in yacc) to understand all legal RFC822 dates. rn does not, but rn makes no attempt to parse Date: headers; it's just a uninterpreted string as far as rn is concerned (no time-based sorting). >My question: is this within the limits of valid date headers? Yes, it's a valid date, and evidently nn is broken. There is an official standard; news software should obey the standard. It's not enough just to fix nn to handle the day of the week; do the full job. You don't have to write the code, either. Grab the file "getdate.y" (first written in 1979; it's as old as the net) from the news 2.11 distribution (just about every net site will have this around somewhere) and use it. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck