Kim wrote:
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 [...] 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?
Depends on what you mean by "common", I suppose. It's certainly a vital one. Just last week I was researching something, and went to the web distribution page to find a copy of tzcode93 and couldn't find it, and was very glad to discover that it was still available on the ftp site. I'm troubled by the number of times I still find myself using ftp (and not just for accessing the tz db, that is!), because it's such a clumsy, old, insecure protocol. But there are a number of things it still does quite well. So I'm with Zefram in lobbying for something comprehensive and machine- as well as human-readable. Steve Summit