Sorry for the delay in dealing with this. I've turned out to not be as medically fixed up as I thought I was.
Reviewing your libtime-olsontz-data-perl, I'm afraid your patch doesn't do enough. You've made the Perl module use the tzfiles from /usr/share/zoneinfo at runtime, so it gets whatever version of the files is currently installed as part of the tzdata package, but the rest of the module has baked-in metadata for a particular version of tzdata. You must do something to ensure that the module serves metadata for the same version of tzdata that is installed. The prebuild script, which you said you don't want to touch, is what generates the Perl source form of the metadata, based on the Olson database source. To do without prebuild entirely, you'd have to get the metadata into Perl form in some other way. Some of it (country-based zone selection data) is available under /usr/share/zoneinfo in a different form, but some (directional link data) is not. So it's not feasible to implement Time::OlsonTZ::Data correctly based entirely on data from the tzdata package as it currently exists. It would be a somewhat bad idea even if tzdata were minimally modified to make it possible: you'd be applying logic from Time::OlsonTZ::Download at runtime, somewhat inefficiently. A sensible approach really requires that you run the prebuild script against each version of the Olson database. You can use the wrapper part of Time-OlsonTZ-Data (from a CPAN version that you're happy with, eviscerated by "./prebuild bare") and apply it to each new Olson database version yourself, duplicating what I'd do to make a new version of Time-OlsonTZ-Data for CPAN. Your options really revolve around how you split data between the tzdata and libtime-olsontz-data-perl packages and how the packages are coupled. If you keep the metadata in the Time/OlsonTZ/Data.pm file, and keep the file in the libtime-olsontz-data-perl package, then libtime-olsontz-data-perl needs to declare that it depends on an exact version of tzdata. E.g., libtime-olsontz-data-perl 0.201304 depends on tzdata=2013d. Generally, any arrangement that has versioned data in both packages needs such a dependency declaration, in one direction or the other, to ensure that the packages upgrade in lockstep. Other options involve putting all the versioned data in the tzdata package. You'd keep the wrapper part of the Time-OlsonTZ-Data source around as build-helping code for the tzdata package. When building a new version of tzdata you'd apply the prebuild script to generate what amounts to the Time/OlsonTZ/Data.pm file, from its template, and then install that file as part of the tzdata package. In the simplest version, you generate the actual Time/OlsonTZ/Data.pm file, and install it directly into a Perl module directory. The libtime-olsontz-data-perl package could actually be superfluous that way. Another way, libtime-olsontz-data-perl installs a Time/OlsonTZ/Data.pm file that doesn't contain metadata itself but invokes the Perl file from the tzdata package to acquire it. -zefram
