Re: RSS If-Modified-Since

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:15:36 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

j> Well OK but I bet
j> If-modified-since: Wednesday, 13-Feb-08 00:45:19 GMT
j> means 1908.

You may be right, RFC 850 doesn't specify the conversion.  Sorry I
didn't consider that in my original response (typical engineer response
to man in balloon asking "where am I" -- "in the air" :)

I don't know if the date should be 1900+x or (1900+x when x > 50, 2000+x
otherwise).  I'll bet that's one of the reasons RFC 850 is obsolete, so
let's instead try to fix the root problem.

So, what's sending that header?  In Emacs 22, it seems to be
lisp/url/url-util.el:url-get-normalized-date and it definitely has the
behavior you noted.  Since the bug may affect other things (there's a
comment about Plexus servers in the code) I won't attempt to fix it
myself, though it's not hard to do.  Please, emacs-devel-opers, let me
know if I should submit a fix.

I think format-time-string is the right function to do this, but there's
probably subtleties that I don't know.  At least for time zones,
format-time-string will handle them correctly.

j> Say, I use Debian sid  emacs-version "22.1.1" gnus-version "Gnus v5.11".
j> If I wish to help out by reporting against a more current gnus, which
j> one should I download and use? Would I have to also install a more
j> current emacs? Too much trouble then...

To report Gnus bugs, it's most helpful to check against the latest Gnus
from CVS.  That should not require an extremely new Emacs (22 should be
OK), but I don't know for sure, sorry.  I use Emacs from CVS for other
reasons.

Ted