One odd possibility on standardizing access to version information: a zic'd line such as... Zone Version 0 - 2021c ...would allow use of the command... TZ=Version date ...to discover the version.-) @dashdashado On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 1:01 PM Tom Lane via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Philip Paeps via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
This is looking terribly fragmented. Spare a thought for a hypothetical engineer tasked with debugging a Java application on Debian with some Python scripts on Fedora talking to a PostgreSQL database running on FreeBSD...
BTW, that brings a thought to mind: why isn't there an easy way to identify the release version of an installed tzdata tree?
I'm envisioning that there could be a text file at the top level, say /usr/share/zoneinfo/version in typical layouts, containing "2021a" or the appropriate string. This'd make it a lot easier to diagnose what you've got in a particular installation.
Some vendors (Red Hat at least) include the tzdata.zi file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. I persuaded Paul awhile back to put a version comment at the top of that, so that provides a way to determine the version if your vendor did that. But it seems like a mighty redundant approach.
regards, tom lane