kherron@ms.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron) (06/18/91)
herman@corpane.uucp (Harry Herman) writes: >>>... An unparsable date (which >>>might something as innocuous as a new time zone) does not intrinsically >>>cripple the article, as a bad Message-ID does for instance.... >>Unfortunately, it does, because it might be a garbled version of a stale >>date. A parsable date is a non-negotiable requirement. >Since dates are important, then have C-News recogonize the date formats >that really exist on the net, not according to what a piece of paper says >they should look like. You are arguing trivialities here. If you'll look at (for instance) the last dropped-articles report from ukma, you'll see that: 201 articles were dropped for having malformed header lines 52 were dropped for having malformed message ID's 17 were dropped for having no Subject: header 16 were dropped for having no From: header 4 were dropped for having dates in the future 3 were dropped for having malformed dates 1 was dropped for not having a date --- 294 total You are making a lot of noise, considering that malformed dates comprise 1.0% of the total. For reference, here are the bad dates: <1991Jun14.084025@proton.mpr.ca> -- `Fri Jun 14 15:40:25 1991 GMT' <1991Jun14.084353@proton.mpr.ca> -- `Fri Jun 14 15:43:53 1991 GMT' <9106131338.aa17767@loper.cs.vu.nl> -- `Thu, 13 Jun 91 13:38:27 MET DST' More to the point, while there is only one correct date format, there are a large number of incorrect ones. Any time the date format has to be guessed at, the possibility exists that the guess is wrong. That sort of thing can (and has) led to storms of outdated mail being redistributed. >Work with the writers of other news systems to get them to write new code >to match that piece of paper. Are you volunteering to become the header policeman? My job description doesn't include debugging other sites' software because some author somewhere couldn't read an rfc. A lot of sites mentioned in the dropped- articles report don't even have a good "usenet" or "postmaster" address to send complaints to; should I still assume they'll immediately leap in and fix header problems? Judging from the number of repeat offenders in the report, I'd say many of them won't. Most posters on this topic (including you) have agreed that eventually sites should be made to conform to the rfc's; what people don't realize is that this time has arrived. -- Kenneth Herron kherron@ms.uky.edu University of Kentucky +1 606 257 2975 Department of Mathematics "So this won't be a total loss, can you make it so guys get to throw their mothers-in-law in?" "Sure, why not?"