On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Karen Tracey <kmtra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Eric Firing <efir...@hawaii.edu> wrote:
>
>> Karen Tracey wrote:
>>
>> Hmm, the Ubuntu packaging for matplotlib seems to put a copy of
>>> matplotlibrc only in /etc, where, I gather, it will not ever be used by
>>> matplotlib? I guess one is supposed to copy it to one's home directory and
>>> do per-user customization there. For my case, where the code is running
>>> under Apache, I'd guess no matplotlibrc is being found so all defaults are
>>> being used.
>>>
>>
>> Karen,
>>
>> That seems a little odd; matplotlib doesn't look in /etc by default.
>> Although I run ubuntu, I have never used the ubuntu package, so I have not
>> run into this.
>>
>> The default matplotlibrc has been stripped down to a bare minimum:
>> everything but the default backend selection is commented out.
>>
>> You may have already discovered this, but in case you haven't, you can
>> find out where the active matplotlibrc is being found by using
>> matplotlib_fname():
>>
>> In [1]:import matplotlib
>>
>> In [2]:matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()
>>
>> Out[2]:'/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/matplotlibrc'
>>
>
> Thanks, I hadn't found that. It seems the Ubuntu packaging has changed
> things a bit:
>
> k...@lbox:~$ python
> Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Oct 5 2008, 19:24:49)
> [GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> import matplotlib
> >>> matplotlib.__version__
> '0.98.3'
> >>> matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()
> '/etc/matplotlibrc'
> >>> matplotlib.get_data_path()
> '/usr/share/matplotlib/mpl-data'
> >>>
>
> Looking at the source code, I see in
> /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/__init__.py (which is actually a
> link to /usr/share/pyshared/matplotlib/__init__.py which I gather is a way
> of having packages that run under multiple Python versions only have one
> copy of the files installed), in matplotlib_fname, the very end is:
>
> path = '/etc' # guaranteed to exist or raise
> fname = os.path.join(path, 'matplotlibrc')
> if not os.path.exists(fname):
> warnings.warn('Could not find matplotlibrc; using defaults')
> return fname
>
> That is, it looks like they have hardcoded '/etc' where the
> lib/matplotlib/__init__.py file in SVN has a call to get_data_path(). Don't
> know why, but apparently if you run the Ubuntu repository version it's
> /etc/matplotlibrc that gets used (assuming nothing is found earlier in the
> search order). They like all config-type files to be under /etc maybe?
>
They are trying to do right by the linux file standard. /etc is really where
the global matplotlibrc belongs.
Darren
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