On 09/30/2016 02:18 AM, Barry Allard wrote:
Has the format changed somehow?
Yes and no. No, because the documented part of the format did not change. Yes, because TZUpdater apparently relies on an accidental feature (a version-number macro setting in an uninstalled Makefile) that happened to be part of the tz source code starting in 2012f, a feature that never worked well and was adjusted to work in a different way in 2016g. I did not know about this undesirable dependency as I do not use TZUpdater. The TZUpdater folks did not object to the patches circulated earlier on this list that changed how version-numbering works. So there were breakdowns all around. We have been discussing ways to do better next time, starting by documenting better what is supposed to be stable and what is not guaranteed; see <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-September/024225.html>. For version numbers, we cannot go back to bad old way, as it is incompatible with the now-common practice of accessing data from the Git repository. We'll have to come up with a better way, and document it and support it, so that tools like TZUpdater that want a version string can get one. That way, the TZUpdater folks can modify their software to use the better way. This is currently a topic of discussion on the tz mailing list. Obviously whatever we come up with won't be working until the next tz release at the earliest.