hi
the recent announcment of matplotlib 0.9 made me look through my notes on bugs I've found. With 0.87.7 pylab.axis does not support setting of axislimits, I have attached a crash report. I think the problem is a change in the handling of kwargs in set_*lim in axes.py.
/J�rgen
In [1]: x=arange(0,pi,0.1)
In [2]: plot(x,sin(x))
Out[2]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D instance at 0x01BF6828>]
In [3]: axis(ymin=-1)
···
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
<type 'exceptions.TypeError'> Traceback (most recent call last)
C:\Python25\<ipython console> in <module>()
c:\Python25\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\pylab.py in axis(*v=(), **kwargs={'ymin': -1})
622 """
623 ax = gca()
--> 624 v = ax.axis(*v, **kwargs)
v = ()
ax.axis = <bound method Subplot.axis of <matplotlib.axes.Subplot instance at 0x01BEF1E8>>
kwargs = {'ymin': -1}
625 draw_if_interactive()
626 return v
c:\Python25\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\axes.py in axis(self=<matplotlib.axes.Subplot instance at 0x01BEF1E8>, *v=(), **kwargs={'ymin': -1})
774 try: v[0]
775 except IndexError:
--> 776 xmin, xmax = self.set_xlim(**kwargs)
xmin = undefined
xmax = undefined
self.set_xlim = <bound method Subplot.set_xlim of <matplotlib.axes.Subplot instance at 0x01BEF1E8>>
kwargs = {'ymin': -1}
777 ymin, ymax = self.set_ylim(**kwargs)
778 return xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax
<type 'exceptions.TypeError'>: set_xlim() got an unexpected keyword argument 'ymin'
In [4]: