Build matplotlib with mingw

Hello, I saw John Hunter's post a moment ago on building a

    > win installer for the basemap module. Is is possible to build
    > the matplotlib package itself with mingw/msys?

Yes, that is how I build the win32 installers. Look at the
instructions in setupext.py for win32 -- they point you to a tarfile
win32_static.tar.gz of dependencies (zlib, png and freetype) that you
will need to untar in your build dir. You can skip the GTK stuff in
the build instructions if you do not want to use GTK on win32; in this
case you will probably want to change the default backend in
matplotlibrc to something else *before* you build. Also, note that
matplotlib uses a conditional compilation depending on what modules it
finds at compile time. So if you want to build for Numeric and
numarray, make sure you have installed both before compiling
matplotlib. If you want to compile the gtk* backends, make sure you
have installed pygtk and the gtk runtime and dev libs. And so on.

JDH

John Hunter wrote:

In this
case you will probably want to change the default backend in
matplotlibrc to something else *before* you build.

This brings up a question:

Could we make the default back end code a little "smarter":

For example: have the default default be different for different platforms, and perhaps have an ordered list of defaults, so that when matplotlib starts up, it can try them in order to see if they exist, and pick the first one that does? I think that order of that list would probably be different in different platforms.

Just a thought

-Chris

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