matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Hi John,
> I totally agree with everything you said. wxapp should not be
> instantiated at module level in backend_wx. Unfortunately,
> doing it at show level breaks win32 pylab users -- in fact it
> segfaults with narry a helpful traceback to guide. I think
> the current situation (wxapp at module level) is a bug and
> should be fixed. I simply don't have the resources to do it
> myself. Someone needs or do the dirty work of getting it
> organized in a way that works across platforms and idioms
> (pylab versus app development). 
I hope my earlier email didn't sound too grumpy! 
It does seem that it may be worth thinking about long-term
design and the API and layout of backends again. That's not to
say that the current design and layout is bad, but a better
separation of the library v. interactive code could be helpful.
Then again, maybe it's good enough as is, and it's only the wx
backend that needs work. At this point, there's already enough
inertia of existing code, even subtle changes could have
significant consequences and shouldn't be done lightly.
> wx is still broken on OS X (the toolbar icons look bad). I
> would be very thankful if you would help with this -- it's
> just that we have to make sure that fixing one thing doesn't
> break something else, and that changes need to be tested on
> win32, linux and OS X in applications and in pylab. 
> Admittedly, that is a lot of work: 3 operating systems and 2
> modes is 6 combinations. But this is just one of 5 GUIs
> matplotlib supports, so I hope you can appreciate why I can't
> do it myself.
Hmm, I use OS X regularly, but don't use the toolbars: I'll
look into the bad icons. Personally, I don't much care for the
toolbars and don't use 'from matplotlib.pylab import *'. That
probably means I'm not looking at many use cases.
For GUIs and libraries where the result is visual, defining a
testing procedure seems difficult. Can you (anyone?) suggest a
suite of "standard tests" that might be partially automated?
--Matt