Hi,
On my Macbook Pro I use Python 2.6 as provided by the Enthought Python Distribution. I ran into some problem with Axes3D so I decided to upgrade to the latest version from source. While trying that I got a similiar error message as discussed in
http://www.mail-archive.com/matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg12938.html
i.e. error: png.h: No such file or directory
In short matplotlib could not find libpng (or png.h from that). I had libpng installed via fink in the usual place /sw/include etc. This seems to be a quite natural choice, so I wondered why matplotlib does not find that out of the box. Following the tips in the above post I looked at basedir in setupext.py For some reason the basedirs for darwin where commented out. Uncommenting the basedirs did the trick for me [1] and matplotlib happily installed with the libpng from fink.
Hope this will help other mac users. Thanks for the great work on matplotlib!
Cheers,
Markus
[1] Here the relevant lines for setupext.py
'darwin' : ['/sw/lib/freetype2', '/sw/lib/freetype219', '/usr/local',
'/usr', '/sw'],
# it appears builds with darwin are broken because of all the
# different flags the deps can be compile with, so I am pushing
# people to :
# make -f make.osx fetch deps mpl_build mpl_install
#'_darwin' : [],