Quoting Zefram on Tuesday October 24, 2017:
HTTPS is fine for retrieving a specific release, but FTP offers a couple of other facilities that AFAICS HTTPS doesn't provide. Specifically, by FTP I can enumerate old releases (NLST on the /tz/releases directory), and I can identify the latest release (by processing the directory listing). I've automated those jobs. Is there a recommended way to do these things through the HTTPS interface? (Scraping a human-oriented web page isn't an attractive approach.)
I'm happy to explore providing additional metadata in a structured way if that is useful. There is currently some metadata on the current version that is not currently exposed but could be. Is retrieving old versions of the tzdb a common use case? kim