[tz] Data loss on FTP Server

[Steve Summit]

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