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

[Guy Harris]

On May 28, 2020, at 12:23 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Yes.

For example, the GNU coding standard says of --version:

	https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#g_t_002d_002dversion

"The standard --version option should direct the program to print information about its name, version, origin and legal status, all on standard output, and then exit successfully."

> 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....

And if there *were* a POSIX-portable way to find out the tzdata version, zdump should, *if* there's tzdata from which to find the version using the POSIX-portable way in question, have a *different* flag, e.g. --tzdata-version, to tell it to report that version.