Martin Burnicki wrote:
So the*implementation* of this feature in the lib would also be easier if tzdb provided a standard way to get the version.
/usr/share/zoneinfo/tzdata.zi contains a "# version" line. Though this is reasonably recent in tzdb, and many distributions don't install that file, and it's not part of the stable API. I have my doubts about the version info. Many distributions apply local changes to their tzdb data, and I expect that they're not updating the version line appropriately. So all you have is some sort of vague good-faith attempt at version info; it doesn't guarantee that you have a particular tzdb release. That is, the version info is not something that a portable program should rely on; all it's really good for is as a string that the program can report to the user so that the user can try to debug whatever goes wrong.