Thread: Re: [matplotlib-devel] [sage-devel] Re: upgrading matplotlib and ignoring sage's matplotlibrc

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:49 PM, William Stein <ws...@gm...> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Jason Grout
> <jas...@cr...> wrote:
>>
>> I just finished upgrading the matplotlib spkg to the newest version.
>> See http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/4774
>>
>> This version of matplotlib deprecates some of the constructs found in
>> Sage's matplotlibrc (which is located in $SAGE_ROOT and automatically
>> copied to $DOT_SAGE if needed every time sage starts up). The result is
>> a bunch of deprecation warnings every time Sage starts up (when
>> matplotlib loads Sage's matplotlibrc file). In trying to figure out
>> what to do about this with several other developers, one option that
>> came up was just throwing away/ignoring the special Sage matplotlibrc
>> and using the normal, standard defaults for matplotlibrc (including the
>> standard location for a customized matplotlibrc).
>>
>> In investigating things more deeply, there were only a few real changes
>> we made to the default behavior of matplotlib. IIRC, a few font choices
>> were reordered, legends were changed to display a bit more of the
>> function, and the dpi of saved images was bumped up from 80 dpi to 100
>> dpi (but this should be set when Sage saves an image anyway, so I don't
>> know that this changes anything).
>>
>> So here's a proposal: Should Sage stop distributing a custom
>> matplotlibrc, and ignore matplotlibrc files that already exist in the
>> $DOT_SAGE directories?
>>
>> Note that if people really want to customize the matplotlib settings,
>> they can always use the standard location for matplotlibrc (i.e.,
>> ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc, I think). This will clean code out of the
>> bin repository and reduce startup time for sage as well. Patches which
>> do this are posted to #4774.
>>
>> I vote yes, provided some sort of note is made in the release notes
>> about the ignored matplotlibrc file.
>
> I vote no, since I created the $DOT_SAGE/matplotlib directory
> *precisely* because of problems that happen if you were to do what you
> describe above. For starters, people often also used a system-wide
> Python with their own version of matplotlib -- then end result was
> that if they tried to switch back and forth between sage and
> python/ipython/matplotlib, they would get tons of deprecation
> warnings, since the systemwide version of matplotlib is often
> different than the sage version.
>
> Second, how will what you suggest solve any problems? All you do is
> move the problem from $DOT_SAGE/matplotlib/matplotlibc to
> $HOME/.matplotlibrc. It's exactly the same problem. You just
> temporarily put it off for a while.
>
> I *wish* matplotlib would replace their stupid deprecation warnings by
> something that just updates the matplotlibrc file, and say makes a
> copy of the old one. Is there any way we could catch the warnings and
> if they occur move $DOT_SAGE/matplotlib/matplotlibrc to another file,
> then put a new matplotlibrc in place and print a message that this
> just happened? You could do that by making slightly patching
> matplotlib as well. I think matplotlib's behavior of emitting
> warnings but doing nothing helpful to resolve them is just obnoxious.
Maybe matplotlib developers would accept a patch fixing this.
Ondrej

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Ondrej Certik <on...@ce...> wrote:
>> I *wish* matplotlib would replace their stupid deprecation warnings by
>> something that just updates the matplotlibrc file, and say makes a
>> copy of the old one. Is there any way we could catch the warnings and
>> if they occur move $DOT_SAGE/matplotlib/matplotlibrc to another file,
>> then put a new matplotlibrc in place and print a message that this
>> just happened? You could do that by making slightly patching
>> matplotlib as well. I think matplotlib's behavior of emitting
>> warnings but doing nothing helpful to resolve them is just obnoxious.
>
> Maybe matplotlib developers would accept a patch fixing this.
To address this problem, we went to an all commented out rc file.
That way, when people change their mpl version, they don't get
deprecation warnings. Only people who make specific changes to their
rc file will get deprecation warnings. Those people will know what rc
is and how to change it. I'm disinclined to overwrite files people
have changed -- they may be running multiple versions of mpl under
different scenarios, and each version would be competing with one
another to overwrite the file. mpl has a general philospohy of not
trying to be too helpful -- we want to make it easy for users to
customize, we don't want to customize it for them.
The verbose deprecation warnings are in my opinion mostly a solved
problem: get a new rc file which is all commented out. Just change
the things you want to change, and you will get very few warnings
going forward. When you get them, fix the problem and you will get no
more warnings.
JDH