RSS If-Modified-Since

RSS If-Modified-Since

[jidanni]

Guess which one is sent by gnus, and which by firefox:
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:45:19 GMT
If-modified-since: Wednesday, 13-Feb-08 00:45:19 GMT
No wonder gnus never gets a 304. A RSS trial.
P.S.,
On http://gnus.org/distribution.html
ftp://ftp.gnus.org/gnus/snapshots/ doesn't work
and in CVS, "download" buttons get
 Error: Unexpected output from cvs co: cvs [checkout aborted]: Absolute
 module reference invalid: `/gnus/lisp/nnrss.el'
 Check whether the directory /usr/local/cvsroot/CVSROOT exists and the
 script has write-access to the CVSROOT/history file if it exists.
 The script needs to place lock files in the directory the file is in as well.

Re: RSS If-Modified-Since

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:40:19 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

j> Guess which one is sent by gnus, and which by firefox:
j> If-Modified-Since: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:45:19 GMT
j> If-modified-since: Wednesday, 13-Feb-08 00:45:19 GMT
j> No wonder gnus never gets a 304. A RSS trial.

The header names are case-insensitive, see:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html

section 4.2.  The dates you show are valid as per

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html

section 3.3.1.  The second date format is in common use but obsolete so
it probably should not be used in new applications, but according to the
RFC, in any case, "HTTP/1.1 clients and servers that parse the date
value MUST accept all three formats" and those three formats include the
two you show above.  So can you specifically tell us what the problem is
with the above headers, and which HTTP server doesn't accept it as
valid?

Also, please force yourself to write a proper bug report.  You don't say
what you expected to happen, what actually happened (instead you ask us
to guess which one is from Gnus), and what you did to make the bug
occur.

Ted

Re: RSS If-Modified-Since

[jidanni]

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

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

Re: RSS If-Modified-Since

[Ted Zlatanov]

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