Re: gnus date suggestion

[jason@mastaler.com (Jason R. Mastaler)]

David Moore <dmoore@UCSD.EDU> writes:

> > Don't you think it would be more standard and helpful for gnus to
> > display the day of the week in the "Date" mail header by default?
> >
> > Gnus =       Date: 12 Jan 1997 13:17:58 -0500
> > MH/Mozilla = Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 14:06:24 -0500
> > ELM/Pine =   Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 14:08:29 -0500 (EST)
> 
> 
> 	Yeah, that might be nice, or more generally provide you with a
> format for displaying article times.  Gnus currently uses
> timezone-make-date-arpa-standard to generate those times, but that is
> only truly needed in message.el for outgoing messages.
> 
> 	It'd be great to be able to use format-time-string for this.
> And I just spent an hour trying to fake it out to do so, but it's not
> friendly enough.
> 
> 
> Thoughts & proposal:
> 
> 	Being able to do that helps a lot with strftime in general,
> which is why one should try to provide that functionality whenever
> you make strftime available to people.  And also the ability to tell it
> not to use 'localtime' on the time but 'gmtime'.  This is great, because
> you can then use strftime to display time deltas conviently also.  If
> something runs N seconds, but you want it in hour, minute, second format
> you just do (format-time-string "%H:%M:%S" (list 0 N) t).
> 
> 	And if you want'd to have differently displayed time messages in
> Gnus, you could use something like:
> 
> (defcustom gnus-article-time-format "%a, %b %d %Y %T %Z"
>   "Format for display of Date headers in article bodies.
> See `format-time-zone' for the possible values."
>   :type 'string
>   :group 'article)
> 
> 
> (defun gnus-art-make-date (date &optional local timezone)
>   (let ((tz-date (timezone-fix-time date local timezone)))
>     (format-time-string "%a, %b %d %Y %T %Z"
> 			(encode-time (aref tz-date 5) (aref tz-date 4)
> 				     (aref tz-date 3) (aref tz-date 2) 
> 				     (aref tz-date 1) (aref tz-date 0)
> 				     (aref tz-date 6))
> 			(aref tz-date 6) ; let %Z get the right name
> 		  ))
>     ))
> 
> 
> Proposed changed interface to format-time-string:
> 
> format-time-string: (FORMAT-STRING TIME &optional ZONE)
>   -- a built-in function.
> Use FORMAT-STRING to format the time TIME.
> TIME is specified as (HIGH LOW . IGNORED) or (HIGH . LOW), as from
> `current-time' and `file-attributes'.
> FORMAT-STRING may contain %-sequences to substitute parts of the time.
> ZONE defaults to the current time zone rule.  This can be a string
> (as from `set-time-zone-rule'), or it can be a list
> (as from `current-time-zone'), or an integer (as from `decode-time')
> applied without consideration for daylight savings time, or it can be
> T which specifies the time is a delta rather than a true time.
> 
> 
> 	I would like to see this, or equivalent functionality, in
> xemacs (and gnu emacs), and I'm quite willing to code it, if there is a
> consensus on how it should be done.

Did anything ever come of these suggestions and propositions?
I still think the Gnus "Date:" header format is non-standard.
I also noticed VM 6.29 under 19.15 XEmacs Lucid doesn't have this
limitation.

Gnus = Date: 01 May 1997 09:40:20 -0400
VM   = Date: Thu, 1 May 1997 09:53:01 -0400 (EDT)

-- 
Jason R. Mastaler                                 jason@mastaler.com