Yeah, that's how I'm doing it here: https://github.com/dateutil/tzdata

If you want, I store a metadata file on a mirror of the tzdata archive here: https://dateutil.github.io/tzdata/

The latest metadata is always at: https://dateutil.github.io/tzdata/zonefile_metadata/zonefile_metadata.json

Note that I run the update script manually, so there's a (short) lag between new releases and updates to the metadata file.

On April 30, 2016 3:57:19 AM EDT, Zefram <zefram@fysh.org> wrote:

Jon Skeet wrote:
latest version number in some other easily-retrievable machine-readable
format?

You can do an FTP NLST on the /tz/releases directory, and search through
the list for the highest version number.

-zefram