[Mailman-Developers] Re: Dates

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 12:10:30AM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>     JRA> And therefore, not the best approach, by concensus,
>     JRA> apparently.  Barry?  Have I misunderstood you?
> 
> If ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY is 1 (or 2, and the date is too far
> out-of-whack), then yes, the Date: header for the copy of the message
> being passed to the archiver gets munged.
> 
> IMO, the archiver ought to be doing any date clobbering, but Pipermail
> is too painful to fix.  Again, what do other external archivers do?
> I.e. if you passed an outrageously dated message to MHonArc, would it
> dutifully put the message in the April 2006 slot?

Ok; that's what I thought I'd heard.

> The current approach has one hole, which would be easy to fix if it's
> useful.  Mailman could mark the message with an `authoritatively
> received date' using some X-* header leaving the original Date: header
> alone.  Then the archiver could use that date to slot the message
> regardless of what the Date: header said.
> 
> I'm not sure this is worth it though because 1) there's no standard
> that I'm aware of that would let archivers and list managers/MTAs
> cooperate;

Rough Concensus; Working Code.  (ie: *create* such a header)

>             2) the date Mailman would stamp the message wouldn't be
> /that/ far off of the date the archiver got handed the message anyway,
> so the archiver can always do whatever it wants with dates and it'll
> be close enough; 3) the most recent Received: header is probably close
> enough so that it could be used as the `authoritatively received date'
> as has been suggested.

Assuming you can reliably decide which one to use.  Can you?

> I think we're good enough.  If you don't like Date: header munging and
> have an archiver that handles outrageous dates itself, just set
> ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY to 0 and Mailman will pass the copy of
> the message to the archiver unblemished.

Indeed.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
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