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: <b8bHel-b@cs.psu.edu> <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
