[tz] Version in zoneinfo files?

Paul Ganssle pganssle at gmail.com
Sun Oct 25 18:19:21 UTC 2015


I don't think anyone's stopping you from using old zic to compile newer data. My understanding is that the release version is in the Makefile of all version-2 tzdata files, so nothing would have to change about the tzdata files themselves.

You may well have metadata-incompatible zoneinfo files for some time, however, if compiling them with older versions of zic, but I think there's always going to be some lag between the introduction of a new versioning system and reliability in its adoption.

On 10/25/2015 01:51 PM, Tim Parenti wrote:
> 
> On 25 October 2015 at 13:26, Paul G <paul at ganssle.io <mailto:paul at ganssle.io>> wrote:
> 
>     > I think, as Paul E suggests, keeping the version external is a good choice here.   It encourages people to use whatever the platform provides to find out the exact, local version information.   If anyone knows how to find out what version of tzdata is installed on this macbook I’d love to know :)
> 
>     I think this perfectly illustrates the reason why the versioning should be at the zic level and not downstream.
> 
> 
> There's also the separate matter that tzcode and tzdata are separate and largely independent.  Although there have been a few breaking changes to the data format over the years, in principle, there's little reason someone couldn't use a 2014j zic to compile 2015g data, and I suspect that sort of thing actually happens somewhat often.
> 
> --
> Tim Parenti



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