[tz] Version in zoneinfo files?

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 17:59:23 -0500, Arthur David Olson wrote:
> The fifteen "reserved for future use" bytes near the start of time zone
> binary files are too few for this purpose (take "America/New_York"--and cue

On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 17:37:53 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 02/09/2017 04:44 PM, Steven R. Loomis wrote:
> >>>There are political objections to some of the zone names, so putting
> >>>them in the data files might raise a few eyebrows.
> >Wouldn't the names have been filenames elsewhere on disk, somewhere in
> >the "zoneinfo" directory?
> 
> Not in some installations. Android, I think, does not create
> filenames like "America/New_York". More important, these names are
> not part of the format now, and standardizing them in the format
> would increase the likelihood of causing political irritations. And

I am pretty sure it wouldn't be the best solution to the overall set of
goals being discussed in this thread, but just in case it inspires
better ideas I'll throw the following thought into the ring: 

It occured to me that a way to avoid putting these zone names into the
data file itself yet still have the data file be "uniquely" identified
would be to have some process (hash?) come up with a unique,
shorter-than-15-byte identifier for each zone, which could then be
placed in in the existing "reserved for future use" field in the data
file.


						Nathan


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