matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Hi all,
It's been a long time since I've been able to do any work on Matplotlib 
- prompted (in part) by the demise of my trusty Debian box and its 
replacement by a Mac.
It took me a while to get a working Matplotlib installation, so I 
thought it may be worth documenting how I did it. Note that I have not 
bothered to install Gtk, so John will have to help with that one.
Mac OSX comes with a very nice (and fairly recent) native install of 
Python, so I elected to use that one.
First problem: no Numeric.
MacPython has some nice OXS 10.3 addons at:
http://ftp.cwi.nl/jack/python/mac/MacPython-Panther-2.3-2.dmg.
You probably want to use the package manager to install Numeric. Don't 
forget to install the source (or, if lazy, install the binaries, and 
copy arrayobject.h, f2c.h, ranlib.h and ufuncobject.h to 
System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/include/ 
python2.3/Numeric
Next problem: no libpng.
Simple solution is to install libpng3 via Fink. The Matplotlib 
installer knows where to look for Fink packages, so no editing needed.
Incidentally, two minor updates to the CVS version of backend_wx:
* Toolbar now displays correctly on Mac OSX (MAC doesn't like having 
toolbar controls in a sizer, but wants to see them in a managed 
toolbar. Side effect of this is that the toolbar is at the top of the 
frame on OSX.
* Wx should now terminate the mainloop correctly when the last frame is 
closed.
Regards
Jeremy

Hi folks,
Firstly, congratulations on matplotlib - a great tool.
I thought I would share with you the problems I have had (and overcome) with installing matplotlib
on my computer (which runs Linux with many packages taken from source).
The short version, is that I could not simply run
 python setup.py build
but instead had to run:
 sed -e "s@.*linux2.*@ 'linux2' : ['/usr/local', '/usr',],@" setupext.py >newsetupext.py
 mv newsetupext.py setupext.py
 sudo mv /usr/local/include/pygtk /usr/local/include/pygtk-1.2
 CC=g++ python setup.py build
 sudo mv /usr/local/include/pygtk-1.2 /usr/local/include/pygtk
I have things like fontconfig installed in /usr/local, so had to add /usr/local to the path
(explaining the sed).
I also have both pygtk1.2 (0.6.11) and pygtk2.2 (2.2.0), including the header files. Since pygtk1.2
installs its header files in /usr/local/include/pygtk, and pygtk2.2 in /usr/local/include/pygtk-2.0,
 adding /usr/local/include/pygtk-2.0 to the include path and then including pygtk seems to pick up
the pygtk1.2 header files rather than the pygtk subdirectory of /usr/local/include/pygtk-2.0
(explaining the mv's).
Lastly, I needed to explicitly inform python distutils that it is compiling c++ (explaining the
CC=g++ environment variable).
So that this list is searchable, the kind of problems solved by the above were:
/usr/local/include/ft2build.h:56: freetype/config/ftheader.h: No such file or directory
src/ft2font.c: In function `newFT2FontObject':
src/ft2font.c:171: parse error before `*'
and an inability to use the GTKAgg backend because it was compiled against the wrong headers
(complaining at runtime that it could not import _gtk).
Anyway, I hope this is helpful to someone, and sorry if it has been discussed before etc (I only
have a slow dial-up link and browsing sourceforge mailing lists is painful.)
Tim Corbett-Clark.