I don't have any objections to this, but I am completely unfamiliar with puppet. So, puppet is only going to be for headless installs?

I appreciate the work done to get this working with puppet (which I also have no direct familiarity with). I wonder if it makes sense to have this in the main matplotlib INSTALL file. We don't document every possible way to install it (on all the Linux distros, MacPorts etc.) because there are so many and these things have a tendency to get out of date. A few years ago I went through and removed a lot of that information for that reason.

That all said, I have recently been thinking that our download page on the website should have more information like this. Right now, it lists the tarball and the binaries that the matplotlib project itself produces. But in many cases, this is not the best way to install matplotlib, and we should instead steer people to their package managers and the SciPy metapackages like EPD, Anaconda, python(x, y) etc. I think this would fit in with those. So maybe we instead should create a new issue for that? It's a good project for someone who isn't terribly familiar with the code base to do, since it's just documentation, but it's the kind of thing I rarely find the time to do myself 😉

I'm inclined to agree with you, @mdboom. Putting it in the INSTALL file doesn't make a ton of sense, particularly since there are lots of other ways to INSTALL matplotlib that aren't mentioned here, but if there were a good place to reference 'related projects' that might be appropriate. Maybe adding an "alternate installation methods" section to the FAQ would be appropriate? Or maybe adding a "related projects" in the Users Guide before the "What's new in matplotlib section"?

Do either of you have a preference on this? I'm happy to add to the documentation to get the ball rolling on this...

I've been thinking about this some more, and I think that maybe there isn't a better place for this, it's just that the existing INSTALL file is kind of disorganized. Right now, the INSTALL file and what ends up at http://matplotlib.org/users/installing.html is the same. I think instead, the INSTALL file should be pared down to the minimum information about installing from source, and a header added to the top saying something like:

The easiest way to install matplotlib is to use pre-built binaries. See 
http://matplotlib.org/users/installing.html for a list of options.

Then http://matplotlib.org/users/installing.html should become a landing page for as many different installation options as we want to discuss or link to. Ideally something like http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php with big icons for each OS (that when clicked on would take you to detailed information) would be great.

Additionally, as part of this, all of the various FAQ entries that we already have about installation should be reorganized under this heirarchy.

That's all pie in the sky, and a reasonable amount of work, but I think it might help us in the long run. When people ask me in person how to install matplotlib, I usually point them at things like Anaconda if on Windows/Mac, or their package manager if on Linux. But nothing in our documentation really emphasises that. Our download page just links to the binaries we make which aren't always the best choice.

@deanmalmgren Do you still have any interest in working on this?

@tacaswell it sounds like including the puppet install instructions isn't the way the maintainers wanted to go, so I'm not sure that this issue is relevant anymore. If you're interested in using the puppet module, I'm pretty sure its on puppetforge and definitely on github (harder to find on my phone at the moment otherwise I'd share a link)

Given that none of the devs have any expertise in puppet and it sounds like the puppet community has already dealt with this on their end, I am going to close this PR.

Sorry for this taking over a year to get a resolution.

If there are things we can do to make mpl play nicer with puppet please let me know.