Robert Elz wrote:
I have more than doubts, I am convinced that the entire thing is misguided, and that (with the one exception of curiosity value, the ability of an application to tell people which version data it is using) there is no good use of this data
Yes, that's the only good use I can think of as well. That is, the version string is more for diagnosing obsolete or misconfigured systems than for use in ordinary computation. That being said, configuration is of growing importance in software engineering, and I hope that the version comment in tzdata.zi is enough to satisfy needs in this area. With TZDIST the version info is best done via ETags, and this should work with TZif files so that clients can easily see whether they're up-to-date and get a new version if not. See Internet RFC 7808 section 4.1.4 along with: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-murchison-tzdist-tzif-09