[tz] Proposal to change Antarctica/Macquarie to Pacific/Macquarie

[Tobias Conradi]

Some repition of former emails and one use case/practical implication.

Correctness:
1) Macquarie is outside the territory covered by
The Antarctic Treaty 1959-12-01
http://www.ats.aq/documents/ats/treaty_original.pdf
"The provisions of the present Treaty shall apply to the area south of
60° South Latitude"

2) Macquarie is the only location to have the Area Antarctic and be
not south of 60° South Latitude

Fix:
3) The distance from Macquarie to Australian mainland (~2000 km) is
larger than from Madagascar to Africa. Madagascar is placed in the
surrounding ocean under Indian/ , so Macquarie can be placed in the
surrounding ocean.

4) TZ identifiers have been changed if localities have been renamed.
That is, the identifiers have been adapted to new real world
situation. Here, the adaption would be a correction in the data, as is
the change for Macquarie from ISO country AQ to AU. It has been wrong
from the beginning. If one wants to freeze the identifiers, then
please not for actual errors, especially not before a freeze is
officially announced and data be checked.

The location part of the tzid is not necessarily matching anything in
the real world, since there is the 14 character limit and some limits
in the choice of characters. But the area part normally matches the
real world name of the area.

Problem:
5) I just opened tz_world_mp in QGis and when opening the Attribute
Table and sorting by TZID Macquarie is listed out of place. This will
happen in any environment that does sorting by TZID.

Here it is special, since geographic Antarctica is not included in
tz_world_mp leading to only one TZID under Antarctica/....

In map projections Antarctica often gets a special treatment. It may
also be excluded as in
* tz_world_mp (no time zones for Antarctica)
* http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm

In programming a simple string matching on the IDs could remove time
zones located in geographic Antarctica, if Macquarie would be moved
out of Antarctica/....

So this has an effect on programming work.

Summary:
Fixing it now will avoid many discussions or annoyances caused by
Macquarie being placed in an, as far as general definitions of
Antarctica are concerned wrong area. It will help programmers and
other people that work with the data. This is a very special case of
tzid change.

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com