0.84 Strange Install Problem

I'm having trouble compiling 0.84 on Python 2.4 /

    > Ubuntu Hoary (5.04). It seems like when GCC tries to
    > build ft2font it can't find the two files referenced
    > in CXX/extensions.hxx and CXX/objects.hxx.

Do you mean CXX/Extensions.hxx and CXX/Objects.hxx? I just untarred
the 0.84 distribution and they are certainly there

    peds-pc311:/var/tmp/matplotlib-0.84> ls CXX/
    Config.hxx cxxsupport.cxx IndirectPythonInterface.cxx Version.hxx
    cxxextensions.c Exception.hxx IndirectPythonInterface.hxx
    cxx_extensions.cxx Extensions.hxx Objects.hxx

Are you running setup.py from the dir in which it resides, eg

  > python setup.py build

If so CXX/Extensions.hxx and CXX/Objects.hxx will be in your '.' (ie
current dir) include path. Perhaps there is a problem with include
flags in setupext.py. Try replacing the add_base_flags function in
that file with this one:

def add_base_flags(module):
    incdirs = [os.path.join(p, 'include') for p in basedir[sys.platform]
               if os.path.exists(p)]
    libdirs = [os.path.join(p, 'lib') for p in basedir[sys.platform]
               if os.path.exists(p)]
    module.include_dirs.extend(incdirs)
    module.include_dirs.append('.')
    module.library_dirs.extend(libdirs)

    > I installed (through apt) python-cxx, but this didn't
    > seem to change anything.

No, we use our own CXX

    > This seems like a completely trivial problem
    > (especially compared to the other frutrations I have
    > had with matplotlib in the past), but I don't know
    > how to fix it...

Perhaps the approach above will fix it. If not, you may want to
enable universe and multiverse in your /etc/apt/sources.list and then
add

deb http://peds-pc311.bsd.uchicago.edu binary/

and do

  > sudo apt-get update
  > sudo apt-get python-matplotlib-jdh

These are hoary debs that I maintain for our local system. I'm
certainly an amateur debian package maker, but they seem to work and
usually track matplotlib CVS fairly closely.

JDH