At 10:42 PM -0700 7/21/03, Paul Eggert wrote:
Chuck Soper <chucks@lmi.net> writes:
Does this indicate that I'm using a different version of the timezone package?
Most likely, yes.
I would like to be able to verify what version of the timezone package (data and tools) is installed on my operating system. If I had evidence that an old version of the timezone package was being used in a current operating system then I could file a problem report with the OS vendor. This mechanism could facilitate OS vendors to stay current with the time zone package (I don't know if this is an issue). I think that adding version information to each time zone information file might be a way to verify version information for these data. In a previous post, Martin Smoot suggested that the sixteen bytes reserved for future use in the header might be used for version information. Would both a package version and a file version be needed?
How can I determine what version of the timezone package is installed on my system? I hope that I'm using version 2003a.
There should be a way to do this, at least for the timezone code like zdump.c. Perhaps you could add a "--version" option for zdump and zic? If you donated code to do that, I suspect that Arthur David Olson would buy it.
zdump has this at the start:
#ifndef lint #ifndef NOID static char elsieid[] = "@(#)zdump.c 7.29"; #endif /* !defined NOID */ #endif /* !defined lint */
and zic.c has something similar, but they don't work well. Nowadays many compilers optimize away these unused strings.
Basicall, all the "--version" option needs to do is to print the elsieid.
A "--version" option for zdump would also be useful.