Re: [toasty@dragondata.com: Re: Leap second reminder]

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@apache.org>]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 07:53:51PM +0000, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:
> 1) ISO 8601 specifically defines ":60" as a valid representation for  
> seconds, just for this event.  If your app breaks, it's probably not  
> obeying the relevant RFC.
> 
> 2) Anything using the obvious implementation of regular expressions  
> to check for a valid time is probably going to fail "23:59:60",  
> leading to events not being logged,  or transient weirdness for that  
> second.
> 
> One example I thought of after a few minutes is SpamAssassin, who  
> will flag a mail header:
> 
> Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:59:60 +0000
> 
> As "INVALID_DATE", bumping up its spam score by 1.7 to 2.0(by  
> default), because of the regexp it uses which contains "[0-5][0-9]"

Hrm.  Well, in looking at my corpus, I have 0 hits for "60" in the seconds
place, and only 5 spam hits for "60" in the minutes place.  So I'd say
we could add in "60" as a valid number of seconds and not have any issue.  On
the flip side, I don't think this is a very serious issue since there were no
hits on ham at all -- but we should be correct in behaviour.

I'm putting in a new version in my sandbox (along with a new more "strict"
version) which accepts 60 as valid for seconds, along with a test to make sure
it's allowed.

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