Automattic / Automattic/pocket-casts-ios

Allow feeds without a valid pubDate to be added (e.g. LibriVox)

Open
#108 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
[Type] Enhancement
Dominant language
Swift
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Forks
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Avg merge
17h 20m
Merged PRs (30d)
103

Description

### Expected behavior
Feeds without a `pubDate` should still be downloadable, perhaps with a warning that things will show in feed order rather than pub order (as one would expect for an audiobook like those in LibriVox). In my use case, the `pubDate` element was commented out.

At bare minimum, the error message should state why the feed cannot be added (e.g. `missing pubDate!`), but ideally it'd gracefully allow one to continue.

### Actual behavior
One gets an error when trying to add the feed.

### Steps to reproduce the behavior

Try adding the following feed:

Source: https://librivox.org/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-version-5-dramatic-reading-by-mark-twain/
RSS: https://librivox.org/rss/9632
Modified RSS: https://pastebin.com/raw/m4SixrW2

##### Tested on web and iOS 15

This is a long-standing issue; see also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pocketcasts/comments/ekin6r/i_finally_found_ways_to_overcome_the_librivox/

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No source files, tests, or entry points are named. Reproduce the add-feed failure with the modified LibriVox RSS and trace the validation path; done means feeds missing pubDate can be added with the stated ordering warning, or the error clearly explains the missing field.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
swift
Domain
mobile
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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