On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Jason Grout <[email protected]> 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. -- william --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
