[tz] Macquarie Island - ISO 3166-1 code AQ vs AU

[Stuart Bishop]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 5:43 PM, Tobias Conradi
<mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Tobias Conradi
>> <mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
>>> What is the reason to have Macquarie Island as AQ Antartica in the
>>> IANA time zone database?
>>
>> Macquarie Island is politically Australian territory, but
>> geographically on the Antarctic continent.
>
> Pacific Ocean, between NZ and AQ
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Island
> "Macquarie Island lies in the southwest corner of the Pacific Ocean,
> about half-way between New Zealand and Antarctica, at 54°30S,
> 158°57E."

And I think consensus is that it sits on Antarctic continent. There
are no ISO country codes for the oceans, so the choice is political
allegiance (AU) or geographic location (AQ).

>>I don't know if the 'ISO
>> 3166 2-character country code' zone.tab refers to is supposed to
>> reference the political or geographic code,

> I don't know why that field should be used differently and am not
> aware of other deviations from the ISO standard.

Ok, the ISO 3166-1 list uses the "south of 60°" definition.

I think you are right and AU would be correct. Continental borders
seem to be fuzzy things, and the timezone can straddle them like
Europe/Istanbul.

-- 
Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/