My confusion with Asia/Aqtau

[Chuck Soper]

At 10:42 PM -0700 7/21/03, Paul Eggert wrote:
>Chuck Soper <chucks at lmi.net> writes:
>
>>  Does this indicate that I'm using a different version of the 
>>timezone package?
>
>Most likely, yes.

I would like to be able to verify what version of the timezone 
package (data and tools) is installed on my operating system. If I 
had evidence that an old version of the timezone package was being 
used in a current operating system then I could file a problem report 
with the OS vendor. This mechanism could facilitate OS vendors to 
stay current with the time zone package (I don't know if this is an 
issue).

I think that adding version information to each time zone information 
file might be a way to verify version information for these data. In 
a previous post, Martin Smoot suggested that the sixteen bytes 
reserved for future use in the header might be used for version 
information. Would both a package version and a  file version be 
needed?

>  > How can I determine what version of the timezone package is installed
>>  on my system? I hope that I'm using version 2003a.
>
>There should be a way to do this, at least for the timezone code like
>zdump.c.  Perhaps you could add a "--version" option for zdump and
>zic?  If you donated code to do that, I suspect that Arthur David
>Olson would buy it.
>
>zdump has this at the start:
>
>#ifndef lint
>#ifndef NOID
>static char	elsieid[] = "@(#)zdump.c	7.29";
>#endif /* !defined NOID */
>#endif /* !defined lint */
>
>and zic.c has something similar, but they don't work well.
>Nowadays many compilers optimize away these unused strings.
>
>Basicall, all the "--version" option needs to do is to print
>the elsieid.

A "--version" option for zdump would also be useful.