Zefram wrote:
Secondly, I'm wary of the purposes to which this information might be put. It looks like you intend it for debugging/tracing purposes, which is OK. But people might end up using it in semantically significant ways, such as selecting a tzfile by searching for the one with a particular version/name tag. Such use should be discouraged. If you explicate in tzfile(5) that these tags do not affect the meaning of the file, that should be OK.
How is the 'current' version of the binary file identified? If one assumes that the latest version is the only 'correct' one, the problem is ensuring that IS what one is looking at? If a distribution has not updated this then the problems of old data arise. One of my other services 'dials home' and asks what the latest version number is and will warn if the local copy is older. That uses a timestamp in the data file. Managing the history of changes is a separate problem, so the embedded stamp can only define 'latest' snapshot? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk