320677 - <item pubdate> ignored if RFC3339-format

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[John W. Kennedy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: LL

Strictly speaking, a <pubDate> element isn't even supposed to be part of an RSS 0.91/0.92 <item> element, but it is commonly found there, and Thunderbird makes practical use of it. However, it doesn't accept timestamps in RFC3339 format, although it accepts in other formats.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Subscribe to http://forum.delorme.com/rss.php?f=71
2. Wait a day or two.

Actual Results:  
Items are time-stamped when they are retrieved, rather than according to input.

The same items are pulled over and over and over again, on the false belief that they are fresh every time they are encountered.

Expected Results:  
Items should be time-stamped as they are in the RSS.

Duplicate results should be far less.

I can't very well tell the feed that they're using the wrong format, since the 0.92 standard doesn't specify that <pubDate> should be there in the first place.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Original summary stated (only) the TB version: "version 1.5 (20051025)"

Comment 2

[Robert Sayre]

Attachment: use our W3CDate function in dateRescue

We can catch and recover from this fairly easily. Lots of other feeds do this, like Apple iPhoto.

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

fixed on the trunk and the thunderbird 2.0 branch. 

I didn't think this was severe enough to go into the security/stability update (1.5.0.x), lemme know if you disagree.

Comment 4

[John W. Kennedy]

For what it's worth, I would be eternally grateful if it could be in 1.5.0.1. It is costing me something like 10-15 minutes a day of rereading and deleting messages I've seen before.