Build for python2.2?

Community matplotlib-users
1

I recently found matplotlib and think it's _exactly_ what

    > the python environment needs from the scientific perspective
    > ... interactive plotting as good as (or better than)
    > Matlab's, that also makes it easy for Matlab users to be
    > converted. :wink: I'm very impressed in the
    > effort-to-date. Unfortunately, other software I use forces
    > me to stay with python2.2, and I'm having tremendous trouble
    > building matplotlib for win32. Might someone have a pointer
    > to a self-installing executable for matplotlib compiled
    > against python2.2 that is a more recent version than
    > v0.54.1??

    > Thanks! And cheers to all the developers of this package.

Hi Gary - thanks for the kind words (and thanks for the stats module
as well, which I've been using intermittently for years).

There is a bug in the _tkagg extension in the python2.2 build which
has never been tracked down and fixed, which is why we stopped
releasing it. You get a missing DLL error when you try and load it.
I opened _tkagg.pyd in dependency walker, and the DLL is one of the
Visual Studio .NET dlls - though sometimes dependency walker fives
false alarms.

As I write this, it occurs to me the problem that arose in 2.2 may
have been coincident in my changing build environments (I don't know
if Todd experienced a similar problem with his numarray builds with
tkagg and python2.2, but I think he may have ...).

The other backends still work fine for python2.2 (GTKAgg, WXAgg,
etc...). I don't know if you can use these, though, since you
specifically mentioned interactivity in your post. I'd be happy to
send this build to you if you like (I built it for 0.61.0 yesterday
after your email).

The other options are

- I can try and build on my old computer where maybe the problem
   doesn't exist and hence tkagg would work

- I can try and fix the problem! Clearly the best solution, but I
   don't have any great leads right now.

Are you primarily a numarray or Numeric user?

Cheers,
JDH

2

This may be more FUD than fact but... my recollection of this is that
different versions of Tcl/Tk are used between Python-2.2 and
Python-2.3, I believe 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Our process for
creating the windows binaries for maplotlib requires a copy of the
Tcl/Tk headers. The last time I tried to make a 2.2 version of
matplotlib, I was able to get matplotlib to compile and link using
different Tcl/Tk headers (8.3), and matplotlib imported successfully,
but it was unstable. So, my impression is that the problem boils down
to getting Python-2.2 specific support for Tcl/Tk into win32_static.

Regards,
Todd

···

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 09:07, John Hunter wrote:

    > I recently found matplotlib and think it's _exactly_ what
    > the python environment needs from the scientific perspective
    > ... interactive plotting as good as (or better than)
    > Matlab's, that also makes it easy for Matlab users to be
    > converted. :wink: I'm very impressed in the
    > effort-to-date. Unfortunately, other software I use forces
    > me to stay with python2.2, and I'm having tremendous trouble
    > building matplotlib for win32. Might someone have a pointer
    > to a self-installing executable for matplotlib compiled
    > against python2.2 that is a more recent version than
    > v0.54.1??

    > Thanks! And cheers to all the developers of this package.

Hi Gary - thanks for the kind words (and thanks for the stats module
as well, which I've been using intermittently for years).

There is a bug in the _tkagg extension in the python2.2 build which
has never been tracked down and fixed, which is why we stopped
releasing it. You get a missing DLL error when you try and load it.
I opened _tkagg.pyd in dependency walker, and the DLL is one of the
Visual Studio .NET dlls - though sometimes dependency walker fives
false alarms.

As I write this, it occurs to me the problem that arose in 2.2 may
have been coincident in my changing build environments (I don't know
if Todd experienced a similar problem with his numarray builds with
tkagg and python2.2, but I think he may have ...).