The Sage developers have found two issues with MPLCONFIGDIR:

 - First, when upgrading from version 0.99.3 to 1.0.0, the contents of
that directory seem to cause compatibility problems.  That is, once
you upgrade to a version of Sage using 1.0.0, it overwrites whatever
was in that directory, and then you get errors when using an older
version of Sage which still uses 0.99.3.  See
<http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9221#comment:82> for an
example of the sort of error which arises, and see
<http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6235> for our fix: in Sage,
we set MPLCONFIGDIR to different directories based on the version of
matplotlib.

 - Second, the following code in matplotlib/texmanager.py can cause a
race condition when creating MPLCONFIGDIR:

    if not os.path.exists(texcache):
        os.mkdir(texcache)

In particular, when running doctests for Sage, if MPLCONFIGDIR doesn't
exist, two different doctests can try to create it at the same time,
causing a problem.  (I've also heard people suggest that these sort of
race conditions can be security issues, but I don't know about the
validity of this.)  See
<http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10159> for our fix: we
replace those lines by

    try:
        os.mkdir(texcache)
    except OSError, e:
        assert e.errno==errno.EEXIST, 'Cannot create %s.' % texcache

(and also add "import errno" at the beginning of the file).

I'd be happy to hear any comments you might have about these.

-- 
John Palmieri

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