[tz] Programmatic way of determining the latest release number?

[Chris Rorvick]

If you have the git repository, you could do something like this:

  $ git fetch
  $ version=$(git describe --abbrev=0 origin/master)
  $ echo $version
  2016d

The above assumes a conventional upstream remote repository of
"origin".  If you're doing something less conventional, you probably
know how to modify the above accordingly.  :-)

Chris

On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 2:39 AM, Jon Skeet <skeet at pobox.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm aware of the ability to use ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzcode-latest.tar.gz
> and the similar data URL to get the latest actual files, but is there a URL
> which either serves an HTTP redirect to the latest version, or gives the
> latest version number in some other easily-retrievable machine-readable
> format?
>
> I could parse the content of http://www.iana.org/time-zones, but that
> doesn't feel like a very robust approach :)
>
> Presumably this might all drop out of the tzdist work, but I was wondering
> whether there was a low-tech way at the moment.
>
> Jon
>