[tz] zdump --version reports "unknown" on OpenSuse 15.1 [2020a]

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Thu May 28 07:23:27 UTC 2020


On 5/25/20 5:49 AM, listclient at hayo.de wrote:
> From the perspective of the zdump user, the current situation is not
> that good. I think all distributions should return similar output. And
> the output should contain the tzdata version.

That's not what the --version flag is for. --version is supposed to output the
version number of the program, not of any data. This is the common meaning of
"--version" across a wide variety of programs.

Many distributions update tzcode (the source code for zdump) more rarely than
tzdata, and it's helpful to keep the two version numbers distinct in that case.

zdump is intended to be portable to any system that conforms to POSIX, and since
there's no POSIX-portable way to find out the tzdata version, zdump doesn't do
that. There might not be any tzdata at all, and zdump is still supposed to work.
Though perhaps this zdump design goal should change at some point....


More information about the tz mailing list