Why does the Django Atom1Feed use atom:updated instead of atom:published?

I made an Atom feed in Django using a class that looks something like this:

class AtomFeed(Feed):

  开发者_如何学编程  feed_type = feedgenerator.Atom1Feed

    # ...

    def item_pubdate(self, post):
        return datetime.datetime(post.date.year, post.date.month, post.date.day)

The resulting XML for an item:

<entry>
  <title>..</title>
  <link href="..." rel="alternate"></link>
  <updated>2010-10-18T00:00:00+02:00</updated>
  <author><name>...</name></author>
  <id>...</id>
  <summary type="html">...</summary>
</entry>

The thing to note here is that the date goes in the atom:updated element, not the atom:published element.

The RFC clearly suggests to me that this is not the intended usage:

The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way the publisher considers significant. Therefore, not all modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value.

Whereas:

The "atom:published" element is a Date construct indicating an instant in time associated with an event early in the life cycle of the entry.

This is more than just a theoretical problem. Google Reader, for example, does not seem to use the updated element, and uses the date that it first saw the item appear. As a result, it does not order the items properly upon first import of the feed.

The code in Django responsible for this:

django/utils/feedgenerator.py:331

if item['pubdate'] is not None:
    handler.addQuickElement(u"updated", rfc3339_date(item['pubdate']).decode('utf-8'))

There appears to be no mention of the published element.

Is this a bug in Django? Am I misunderstanding the Atom RFC? Am I missing something else?

You are not missing anything. The Atom RFC is correct, and this is a known bug in Django; see this Django bug.

It looks like a relatively simple fix, so feel free to get in there and patch it! ^_^