Comment 2 for bug 716818

Loading information from a zipfile rather than the standard compiled zoneinfo database seems doable. open_resource and resource_exists in pytz/__init__.py need to be modified to load resources from the zipfile if it exists at a well known location, falling back to the existing method. We need to support the existing method as that is how resources get loaded from the .egg file, and for pytz installations that make use of the system's compiled zoneinfo database rather than the one distributed with pytz. Of course we also need to build and package the zipfile containing the compiled database.

Note that for many use cases, you can simply use the .egg file instead of the expanded source tree if you want a single file rather than several hundred.