[Mailman-Developers] Re: Dates

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 09:24:59PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> David Champion <dgc@uchicago.edu> writes:
> > On 2001.05.01, in <20010501183541.06693@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>,
> > 	"Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
> > > > correct.  How would it possibly know?  You're discussing ways to make a
> > > > correct guess in most cases, but not a way to ensure correct
> > > > information in all cases.
> > > 
> > > Stipulated.  But we're not rewriting for retransmission, only to keep
> > > the archives clean; right, Barry?
> > 
> > That's what I understand, too.  My personal taste is that an archive
> > reflect with complete accuracy and fidelity what was received from the
> > transmitter -- not the recipient's interpretation thereof.  This is
> > only relevant to particulars of implementation, though, not to whether
> > the general solution is applied at all.  For example, I think it's more
> > appropriate to leave the default at "don't munge incoming mail at
> > all".
> 
> At the risk of prolonging this discussion, it may be worth pointing
> out that there are two different "dates" here:
> 
>  1) The date in the Date: field displayed in the archive
> 
>  2) The date used for sorting and for splitting archives by
>     month/year.
> 
> I'm of the opinion that 1) should always be the same date as generated
> by the MUA, but that using that date for 2) is, from experience, a bad
> idea, because some user's machines will have badly screwed up clocks,
> and you get archive volumes for ridiculous periods, etc.

I think we're all in violent agreement on that point... except maybe
Dan; I can't speak for him, obviously.  :-}

> Currently, Mailman, currently, always uses the same date for both 1)
> and 2) - either the MUA date, or the date when the mail passed through
> mailman. From my perspective, arguing about which one of these
> is superior is somewhat pointless, since as soon as you use the
> same date for both, you are going to have problems.

Well, and I think that's where we started.  IIRC, Barry {was planning,
thinking about, suggesting, had already written} code that rewrote 1 as
2 if it was too far out of whack, because it was easier to fix it there
codewise than splitting them.

[ Checks local archive }

If I correctly understand where clobber_date is called in the flow of
things, that paragraph is correct.

And therefore, not the best approach, by concensus, apparently.  Barry?
Have I misunderstood you?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink
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