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