278694 - Bad date handling on RSS feed of ratiatum.com since 01/01/2005

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 275153

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Romain Michard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
Build Identifier: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=thunderbird&os=win&lang=fr-FR

I've subscribed on http://www.ratiatum.com/rss/news.rss , it's an rss feed.
Before 2005 everything was fine. Since 01/01/2005 every posts are dated with the
right day, the right month but the year 1970. I've reinstalled thunderbird,
tried the french and english versions and on another computer (WinXP too).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.subscribe to http://www.ratiatum.com/rss/news.rss
2.download the feed
3.look at the date of the messages

Actual Results:  
Year is 1970 instead of 2005

Expected Results:  
Make the year 2005

Comment 1

[Romain Michard]

The year is ok with other rss reader.

Comment 2

[Doug Wright]

I can reproduce this

Comment 3

[Robert Sayre]

The dates are invalid (Should be RFC-822, not timestamps)
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ratiatum.com%2Frss%2Fnews.rss

Sample Item:
<item>
 <title>La lutte contre le piratage fait un blessé par balle !</title>
 <pubDate>1105742784</pubDate>
 <link>http://www.ratiatum.com/p2p.php?article=1970</link>
 <description>...</description>
 </item>

JavaScript seems to need a multiplier for Unix timestamps:

js> d = new Date(1105742784)
Tue Jan 13 1970 14:09:02 GMT-0500 (EST)
js> d = new Date(1105742784 * 1000)
Fri Jan 14 2005 17:46:24 GMT-0500 (EST)

Should we patch for this? I can add a rescue attempt in my patch for bug275153. *shrug

Comment 4

[Doug Wright]

Anything but 1970 I would say (even if that would mean no date...)

But if it's easy to grab the correct date we should IMHO. Don't punish the users
for the mistakes of the author.

Comment 5

[Robert Sayre]

(In reply to comment #4)
> But if it's easy to grab the correct date we should IMHO. Don't punish the users
> for the mistakes of the author.

The patch for bug275153 now accounts for this case as well. Seems to work.

Comment 6

[Romain Michard]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > But if it's easy to grab the correct date we should IMHO. Don't punish the users
> > for the mistakes of the author.
> 
> The patch for bug275153 now accounts for this case as well. Seems to work.

OK, but how do I use the patch ?
(Sorry if you find the question stupid but I'm not able to find anything about
that anywhere)

Comment 7

[Robert Sayre]

(In reply to comment #6) 
> OK, but how do I use the patch ?
> (Sorry if you find the question stupid but I'm not able to find anything about
> that anywhere)

You have to compile Thunderbird to apply the patch. I suggest waiting for a patched release of 
Thunderbird (1.0.1 etc). Also, the feed would work correctly if ratiatum.com was generating dates 
correctly, so perhaps you could ask them to fix it. The patch just makes up for their mistake (which is 
probably a common one, since some of the aggregators I tried were able to deal with it).

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #6)
> > The patch for bug275153 now accounts for this case as well. Seems to work.
> 
> OK, but how do I use the patch ?
> (Sorry if you find the question stupid but I'm not able to find anything about
> that anywhere)

You can download a nightly build -- that patch went in yesterday, so getting a 
new build from
  http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/
or
  http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-0.9/

("Latest 0.9" actually means the latest 1.0, I *think*.)


Marking as dupe.  If the problem is in fact not fixed after you test a build 
with the patch, feel free to reopen the bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 275153 ***