Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!drivax!davison From: davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Valid date headers Message-ID: <24EDCAF7.144A@drivax.UUCP> Date: 19 Aug 89 21:02:46 GMT Reply-To: davison@drivax.UUCP (Wayne Davison) Organization: Digital Research, Monterey CA Lines: 28 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!davison