[tz] Version in zoneinfo files?

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at systematicsw.ab.ca
Tue Oct 27 19:25:26 UTC 2015


On 2015-10-27 11:34, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Guy Harris wrote:
>> Which zone name is "the" zone name?  The zone name on the system on which zic was run?
>
> I assume it'd be the name in the Zone directive of the zic input. Presumably zic would also have a new option to specify the version, and Makefile would use the new option. The version and zone name could be appended to the current tzfile format, e.g.,
>
> ZONE=America/Los_Angeles
> VERSION=2015g
>
> If you copy or link the file, that wouldn't change its ZONE line. We'd bump the tzfile version number from '3' to '4'. ZONE and VERSION strings couldn't contain newlines. Or perhaps we should use a different convention that allows arbitrary data in strings.
>
> This is doable; I'm not sure it's worth the hassle, though. There are political objections to some of the zone names, so putting them in the data files might raise a few eyebrows. On the technical side, if you change one source file, will you remember to change VERSION too? and will you be happy that your one little change to America/Podunk updates the VERSION string in all the files that zic produces? That sort of thing.

Perhaps a NUL terminated environment list file suffix like:
	TIMEZONE \0 America/Los_Angeles \0
	TZDATA_VERSION \0 2015g \0
	ZIC_VERSION \0 2015g \0
	DISTRIBUTION \0 iana.org \0
	\0 \0
to which distributions may be allowed to add entries?
This could be useful, for example, to distinguish your test releases, with a git hash for TZDATA_VERSION and possibly ZIC_VERSION, and DISTRIBUTION eggert or https://github.com/eggert/tz or whatever you choose.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada


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