On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan@ochtman.nl> wrote:

I think that would be a little too pure to be practical. There are
many practical usages of tz data that would work fine with a year-old
timezone database.

A year is no age for a Python installation. A customer of mine has one website developed in 2003, still running on the same server. It runs Python 2.3, I don't remember which version, but I'd be surprised if it is 2.3.7 from 2008.

Also, I
wonder if it would be possible to select the copy of the data that is
the most recent (e.g. on Unix, pick the OS version if tzupdate is
installed but older than the OS version).

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, the data files contain no version information (only information on the version of the file format, which currently is 2).

It also contains no information on what the name of the timezone is. This lack of information is unfortunate, but we'll have to live with it. The format hasn't changed since 1989, it is unlikely that we'll get anyone to change it anytime soon.

//Lennart