On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 5:30 AM, Phil Elson <pelson....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it time to have the discussion about dropping the MacOS backend?
>
> I know an incredible amount of top quality developer time has gone into
> it, but in truth it is not up to the *Agg backends and without another
> massive amount of work, never will be. Not to mention the drag that having
> YAB (yet another backend) to maintain and support adds.
>
> Deleting the MacOS backend doesn't mean the end of its life - if somebody
> cares enough they will probably set up a repo and maintain it themselves,
> but I can think of a million and one things I'd sooner have matplotlib
> developers working on than getting the MacOS backend upto the *Agg standard.
>
> Thoughts?
>
I'm not sure how much easier this will make our lives. The backend options
on mac are (in order of mpl's preference):
macosx (no deps)
qt4agg (needs qt)
gtk3agg (needs gtk)
tkagg (needs tk)
wxagg (needs wx)
Don't get me wrong, I am not thrilled with the macosx backend, especially
that can't-draw-outside-the-event-loop issue, but I doubt that dropping it
will make our lives easier. Its big advantage is that it does not require
a third-party windowing library.
If we drop macosx, we're going to have to deal with automated installing of
a windowing library. This is going to be hard because mac doesn't have a
package manager we can rely on (in fact it has 5 that sometimes coexist
brew/macports/fink/manually installed dmg/pip).
The easiest target is probably tkagg. For that backend, there are known
(segfaulting) issues between different combinations of
macos/python.org-python/activetkl. So we will have to have an assortment
of binary installers to cover that problem. We will also have to continue
being wary of multiple versions of tkl installed on the system.
This particular issue looks like a build problem. The change that
introduce the bug was in the 2to3->six transition, which shouldn't have
affect the internals, but obviously did.
-matt
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