There's also share/misc/birthtoken with a list of birth stones and flowers. That's actually much more weird than a list of airport codes.

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/birthtoken

Also a list of operator precedence, various phone area codes (country & local), an ASCII table.

I guess it's just a "list of databases that was useful/fun to someone, at some point". Harder to "just get it from the internet" back in the 80s.

Some things like the ASCII table have been there (or rather in the original location of /usr/pub) since near the dawn of UNIX itself: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/8cf2a84...

(Also available as "man ascii" from almost as long ago https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... )

OpenBSD seems to like collecting extra items though

The phone codes must be terribly out of date and inaccurate those are so hard to maintain even with paid official data sources

I was always more of a Debian person but you're making me want to switch, this is some old internet style fun.

I think mac os also has the list of birthstones

From what I can tell, at least it's historically inherited. 4.4BSD had a list of airports in the same location.

Its inclusion in 4.4BSD seems a mystery though. No other files on the 4.4BSD distribution seem to reference it. The atc(6) game involves airports, but it doesn't seem to actually open this file, both in 4.4BSD and in OpenBSD.

It goes back a bit further than that, to 4.3BSD-Reno https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/sh...

The previous release, 4.3BSD-Tahoe, did not have /usr/share

It could just be a fun Easter egg to keep developers engaged.

History is so quickly forgotten: https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html

.. also: https://www.openbsd.org/events.html

Your reply doesn't seem to answer my question at all. I opened both links, searched for "airport" and "IATA" and nothing relevant came up.

Non-sequitur?

I'm reading "hackathons may occur in airports, therefore OpenBSD should maintain a list of all airport codes."

Suppose the list didn't already exist, how would you justify adding it?

And whatever the valid reason, why isn’t it an import of some official list?

It is an official list: a list of airports visited by OpenBSD developers.

It's just a bit of culture, don't worry about it so much.

Because that would require trusting some third party that claims (accurately? deceptively? who knows) that those airports exist. As maintainers of and contributors to a security-focused OS, OpenBSD devs want to verify the existence of each airport themselves before deciding it's fit for inclusion.

The official list is payware: https://www.iata.org/en/publications/store/airline-coding-di...

Alternatives are to scrape some other website (who presumably paid IATA for the data) or Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_airports_by_IATA_and_...) which may or may not be more complete/accurate than OpenBSD's own crowdsourced list.

Official lists are very often not permissively licensed (or openly at all).

Many weather apps use IATA codes; I've looked them up in that file before for that.

I think it’s nice to have a few small standard data sets that you can use in examples, tutorials, man pages and testing.