On 07/20/2018 11:34 AM, Fred Gleason wrote:
This, of course, is horrendously platform-specific, but that illustrates the larger point: TZDB has historically been integrated in all sorts of ways on all sorts of platforms; to expect a new ‘one true way to get the version’ to get any kind of traction at this point is rather utopian.
I don't think it will necessarily be *easy* to get this universally accepted, but I suspect there are a bunch of platform-specific ways to do this because there has, historically, never been a correct way to do it in the upstream project. If `make install` installs a version file, then only people whitelisting the deployed files or blacklisting that file will be missing it. Also, deploying `tzdata.zi` doesn't hurt. It's a very small file and nothing forces you to abandon your old platform-specific versioning. I suspect that as long as `make install` continues to install `tzdata.zi` by default, as more projects adopt this there will be more demand for platforms to ship that file and eventually it will be widely available.