Yup, Noda Time does the same thing where possible:
https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime/blob/master/src/NodaTime.TzdbCompiler/Tzdb/TzdbZoneInfoCompiler.cs#L145

(I do infer the version from the filename if we have it.)

But yes, another vote for a stable, easily-machine-readable place for the version number to be included in the data tar.gz file.

Jon

On 28 September 2016 at 19:44, Howard Hinnant <howard.hinnant@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sep 28, 2016, at 2:41 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Howard Hinnant <howard.hinnant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The version file does not appear in the uncompressed tzdata2016g database.  This is hurting my ability to report the version of the database to my clients.  Can we please put a version file in the database?
>
> Though I suppose I could scrape the version number out of the NEWS file…
>
> Why can't you deduce the version from the name of the file?  But I agree: non-git based distributions should include the generated version file.

I don’t want to keep the tarball around.  I just have the expanded tzdata directory and its contents.

Howard