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

[David Patte ₯]

+1 for Pacific or Australia

On 2013-04-19 18:34, Tobias Conradi wrote:
> 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.
>


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