I'm aware of the ability to use ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzcode-latest.tar.gz and the similar data URL to get the latest actual files, but is there a URL which either serves an HTTP redirect to the latest version, or gives the latest version number in some other easily-retrievable machine-readable format?

I could parse the content of http://www.iana.org/time-zones, but that doesn't feel like a very robust approach :)

Presumably this might all drop out of the tzdist work, but I was wondering whether there was a low-tech way at the moment.

Jon