Developing Matplotlib Entry Paths for GSoD'20: Suggestions

As a part of this project, I will be documenting my finds on making the tutorials and installation procedures in Matplotlib more accessible to newcomers to get them onboard our awesome repository.
This post will be an informal discussion area so that everyone in the community can review each other’s propositions.

Feel free to drop in your suggestions in this thread. I look forward to integrating your insights :slight_smile:

My suggestions as of now are:

  1. I felt that the links on this page aren’t well-typed because they include :ref: in the hyperlink. And I see this in a lot of places as well, which makes me wonder if this is the right way to go ahead.

  2. Make the following piece of code more readable for this user so that one can identify their working system and go through with the installation procedure.

sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev  # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install freetype-devel  # Fedora
brew install freetype  # macOS with Homebrew
conda install freetype  # conda, any OS

change the above to something like this

### Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev
### Fedora
sudo dnf install freetype-devel  
### MacOS with Homebrew
brew install freetype  
### Conda / Any OS
conda install freetype
  1. Have an entire, end-to-end Linux installation in one place, followed by the entire MacOS installation and then the Windows installation.

  2. As there are four different places to look at for installing Matplotlib, as mentioned in this issue, I’ll be working towards consolidating them into a one-stop, easy-to-use documentation for installation.

Looking forward to your suggestions :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’ll also include the Conda installation procedure, as mentioned here

Is there a more fleshed out version of this proposal someplace? Based on what is here I do not think this would be a strong proposal for GSoD. While improving the installation documentation is very valuable, I think the scope is too limted for a GSoD project.