teus@mcvax.UUCP (Teus Hagen) (09/29/83)
The discussion about the date problem in news has been going on for some time now. No consensus has been achieved yet. So let's try again. The problem falls into different parts: - The ARPA RFC format fails to deal with timezones outside North America (there is a military format, but that does not handle daylight saving time). If we stick to the ARPA format, the only errors are made when interpreting some local times with respect to the standard. DST times can be solved by doing stupid things to the time zone, i.e. DST becomes -0100 ARPA zone. If we leave the standard, I propose that we name the timezones and add the "DST" identification to it for daylight saving time. So the name is the same when daylight saving time is on. For North America, Australia and Europe there are already standards, AST, EST, CST, MST, PST, YST, HST, BST; UTC; AEST, ACST, AWST; EET, MET, WET. In this way "AST DST" stands for Atlantic Summer Time. Of course, those with generally accepted alternatives (AST DST -> ADT) should be allowed too. Three letters is NOT enough. This is a problem in both "news" and "sendmail". - The "news" problem: What does news do with the date and time? News reads it's time and date from the header, tries to interpret it and returns some number of seconds after 1970 (UNIX birthday). Not all the ARPA standard time strings are supported, errors in the interpretation are not supported, so the news is redated to 1970. Then this (possibly 0) number of seconds is given to ctime... So to the second error: in funcs.c the ctime string is interpreted into the ARPA format. The ARPA date routine does not check the input and expects to find something to its own liking. So it makes more errors. Besides that, with another, simpler scheme, the "news" system might again fit on some machines. Proposal: do not change the time and date in news if it is according the ARPA format; use the abbreviations as proposed above, together with "DST" as add on; in the meantime allow something as "-0100" in the ARPA date. Of course one wonders why we are fiddling with the date anyway? Changes to the news_2.10.1 sources will follow separately. -- Teus Hagen Center for Math., Comp. Science (CMCS) formerly Math. Centre (MC) mcvax!teus