matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

> In article 
> <CANNq6Fksj9QgnRPE8jFp_3hnpkQ9647EFUPasUgLB3CgrCik0w@...>,
> Benjamin Root <ben.root@...> wrote:
> 
>> Ok, there has been a lot of useful discussion (for both MacOSX and Windows),
>> but in the end, I want to know this: Is it possible for matplotlib to
>> provide a single, recommended, fully-supported-by-us method for installing
>> our package (possibly for each platform?). Could it be pip? Or some other
>> option?
> 
> I think we'll always need to be able to install from source and also 
> offer a binary on MacOS X.
> 
> * Build from source.
> 
> If your version of MacOS X is recent enough then building from source 
> could easily be made to work (with a few minor changes to setupext.py). 
> Most other projects have managed this. I may be able to find some time 
> to work on this.
> 
> On the good side it would work with nearly any python build and it means 
> any user can install matplotlib in the obvious fashion. For these 
> reasons I think this is very much worth doing. However, it has some 
> disadvantages:
> - It requires that users install XCode
> - I don't think the resulting build will work with older versions of 
> MacOS X, because Apple's libraries aren't backward compatible. This 
> means the user will run into unexpected difficulty if they build and 
> distribute a bundled application. This is a serious problem and means 
> that users must have a binary installer option:
> 
> -- Russell
A while ago, I posted a Makefile [1] that installs matplotlib (together with NumPy and SciPy) on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard without downloading any additional libraries (except from gfortran). Xcode (and Python) are the only dependencies.
I just tried to install the current github master on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (with a self-built Python 2.7.2) and it still works:
 export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.7
 export ARCHFLAGS=-arch x86_64
 export CFLAGS="${ARCHFLAGS} -I/usr/X11/include -I/usr/X11/include/freetype2 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX${MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET}.sdk"
 export LDFLAGS="-Wall -undefined dynamic_lookup -bundle ${ARCHFLAGS} -L/usr/X11/lib -syslibroot,/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX${MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET}.sdk"
 python setup.py build
 sudo python setup.py install
This should make it quite easy to let matplotlib be installed via "pip install matplotlib".
Cheers,
Stefan
[1] http://stefan.sofa-rockers.org/2010/11/17/building-numpy-scipy-matplotlib-python-27-snow-leo/