[tz] Data loss on FTP Server

[Kim Davies]

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