[tz] Are tzdata2016g & tzdata-latest missing the VERSION file?

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/30/2016 12:38 PM, Robert Elz wrote:
> For the
> simpler distribution policies of the tz project, there just "2016g+" or
> something in the repo, immediately after the tarballs are made

Although that's better than the pre-2016g tz versioning scheme, it's 
worse than the current scheme because it would use the same version 
number "2016g+" for every commit between 2016g and the next release. In 
contrast, the current tz versioning scheme updates the version number 
automatically with every commit, and this is more precise. For example, 
in the current development repository (commit 
63207b74698aa9642f9c17f635c65b0114c6d191) the version number is 
2016g-11-g63207b7, whereas in the previous commit the version number is 
2016g-10-g373261b.

In larger projects there may be reasons to use less-precise version 
numbers, as this avoids rebuilding everything that depends on the 
version number merely because some otherwise-unrelated component 
changes. Also there's some inertia, as older projects (such as CPython, 
mentioned by Alexander Belopolsky in this thread) developed their 
versioning schemes with repository software that didn't support 
automatic version-number generation as well as Git does. The tz project 
is small, though, and we don't have to worry about SCCS compatibility 
any more, so neither of these issues are significant for us.