I don't see anything driving this disruptive change other than an email from 16 years ago. I only ever use the tzdata, and was considering writing a script myself to download it. This just seems like needless fiddling with something that isn't broken. Stephen On 22 August 2016 at 16:39, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> wrote:
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2016 08:11:46 -0700 From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> Message-ID: <492db551-d050-d0c0-0b46-2bb49d89c2f8@cs.ucla.edu>
| Yes. I'd like to discontinue the old-style distribution at some point
Old style distribution was a single file containing both code and data. It was split because it was more manageable (for everyone) that way, most people don't really care much about the code - that just serves as a reference implementation, and the various system distributions use their own code (either based originally on the reference implementation, or independently created) and just want the data - which is (or should be) the primary output from this group.
kre
ps: I don't really see any need for a better compression technique than what is currently used (or really, for that matter, any compression at all.) Neither the code, nor the data, and not even the combination of the two, is big enough by modern standards to require it.