Date parsing

[Matt Melton]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> Most common error by *far*, with 65,152 occurrences.  Missing the
> mandatory first digit for the hour.  I even double-checked that this
> really was required, in both the regular and obsolete syntax.
> 

Did your findings implicate a particular user agent?

> 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.  I
> wondered if it would be worth going a step further and using a strict
> parser that doesn't permit the obsolete syntax of RFC 2822, but I'm
> guessing that would catch a lot of news readers that are doign things they
> shouldn't (like using GMT as the time zone instead of +0000, which is very
> common) and basically just cause headaches for people.  But it looks like
> using it for innd is a trickier question.

> Anyone have any thoughts about all this?

Normalization of header dates ?

I recently wrote a quick IRC gateway between the input coming from one
of my
ttySs, in it, i was forced to remove alt codes and other accelerators,
or it
broke the "mirrored" input. I ended up parsing everything, since there
were
so many exceptions.

Can INN not have the option of parsing all date input in the headers?
You
mentioned Perl's sexy Date::Manip, surely and optional hook for low
traffic
servers, parsing and then rendering the date in a popular RFC format.

I'm asking this since I see many old post dates my cgi news archiver
simply
can't understand :(

Matt