Date parsing

Jeffrey M. Vinocur jeff at litech.org
Tue Sep 3 10:20:36 UTC 2002


On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Russ Allbery wrote:

> My new code is also under 400 lines of C and only took me an afternoon to
> write from (mostly) scratch, as opposed to the 863 lines of difficult to
> understand C and yacc that parsedate is.

This is good.

> I think that using the stricter parser in nnrpd for local posts is an
> obvious thing to do, in the "be strict in what we generate" department.  

Where does a malformed date rejection sit relative to the nnrpd posting 
filters?  (That is, can someone who has users that Just Won't Upgrade hack 
around it with a filter.)


> Accepting dates with BST and UTC as time zones and dates with no time
> zones would cut the rejected count down to 2,072 articles (0.05%)

That's still a lot.


> actually about 1,200 of those are articles from 1992 through 1995 on my
> server in the slac.* hierarchy that have fully spelled-out weekday names,
> so with those changes the rejections would probably be in the noise.

How does makehistory deal with this?  (We certainly don't want old 
articles to suddenly vanish one day.  But clearly it needs to know the 
date, so if the new parser can't parse...)

-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org



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