In article <CAN...@ma...>, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> 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: * Binary installer (.mpkg or egg) This is how things are done now. The binary installer can include statically linked backward compatible libraries and thus be compatible with many versions of MacOS X. Thus users can safely include matplotlib in bundled applications. There are many choices, including Apple's build-in python, python.org, Enthought, ActiveState, MacPorts... Most projects, including matplotlib, provide binary installers for python.org python because Apple's python is useless for distributed apps and is hard to upgrade, and most other projects provide their own installers for matplotlib. So I would hate to see matplotlib give up on binary installers, but we could and should improve our ability to build matplotlib from source on MacOS X. Another issue is how to distribute the binary installers. I like .mpkg installers because they are pretty good about installing with compatible versions of Python. We've tried binary eggs in the past and they were not good about finding the right version of Python. That may have improved. -- Russell