i use those four fairly regularly myself, and find it much easier than
   pulling down a bookmarked web site whenever i need to look something
   up, especially if i have no connectivity at the time.  i'll maintain
   them, if no one else wants to, but personally, i think they probably
   require less maintenance effort than the time zone stuff, but that's
   just me.


i use the files (essentially *all* of them) in /usr/share/misc pretty
often, and i'd only be slightly upset at the extra diskspace required
to properly update them all, that's OK... but i'd be horrified if they
actually *went away*.