programmatic way to fetch latest release for a given major.minor version

I'm writing a script that wants to know the latest release for a given
major.minor version. Is there some better way than parsing
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/ or trying to connect to ftp
(which is invariably timing out on me today. Is that box getting
hammered or something?) and doing the parsing that? Both approaches
feel quite awkward to me.

Andrew