🚀 go-pugleaf

rsalz@rodan.uu.net (Rich Salz) writes:

>In <bkhAb0F0@twinsun.com> eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:
>>Unfortunately, the RFCs notwithstanding, both C News and INN retransmit
>>articles with nonconforming dates.
>INN does not do this.  If the date is invalid, it rejects the article.
>If the Expires header is invalid, it ignores it.  Perhaps this is what
>Paul means?

I wasn't thinking about Expires, although that's a good point.
I was thinking that since INN's definition of ``valid date'' is more
generous than the RFCs', INN doesn't reject all nonconforming dates.
E.g. from looking at inn/lib/parsedate.y,
it appears that INN accepts and retransmits nonsense like

	Date: 1:2:3pm Serendipitous Tuesday, 13 Nov. 092

under the impression that it's equivalent to

	Date: Friday, 13 Nov 1992 13:02:03 GMT

Propagating such nonsense causes problems for folks like Lyons who have
stricter date parsers.  If you're going to accept nonsense, you must
rewrite it before retransmitting it; if you don't believe in rewriting
headers, you mustn't retransmit articles with nonconforming headers.
Unfortunately, neither C News nor INN conforms to the RFCs on this point,
at least not yet.