In article <4CC9BCD8.60406@...236...>,
> It doesn't really insist on it right? There are MATPLOTLIBDIR and
> MPLCONFIGDIR environment variables.> You can set these env variables within your code, before import of
> matplotlib via os.environment.I'm glad I've learned about this, and will start doing it with my
bundled up apps -- but that does seem pretty un-pythonic -- shouldn't it
be possible to set this sort of thing without resorting to that little
round trip through environment variables?Not a big deal, but it feels kludgy.
-Chris
It's an interesting question. You can't call a matplotlib function to do
it because it has to happen before matplotlib is loaded. I suppose there
could be a configuration package to perform the operation.
Having looked into it some, I confess I am not that sold on using
MPLCONFIGDIR in my bundled applications. Issues include:
* The font cache uses absolute paths.
Thus the cache will break if the application is moved or renamed. So
there is no point to using MPLCONFIGDIR to avoid the problem of
matplotlib crashing when the font cache is out of date. It cannot help!
* Where to put it?
I had hoped to put it in the bundled application itself, so that it
would be thrown out when the application was thrown out. But matplotlib
crashes if the directory cannot be written (pity that; it'd be nice if
it could run without a font cache). Thus the application could not be
run from the disk image or from an Applications directory that an admin
had protected by making it read-only.
I'd like to avoid generating a new MPLCONFIGDIR directory for every
version of my application (or every version of matplotlib). So it seems
to me the only sensible choice is to have one MPLCONFIGDIR shared by all
versions of the application. The only point I can see to doing this is
to avoid user-written matplotlibrc files: the danger that they would
mess up the appearance of the application or be incompatible with the
version of matplotlib in the application.
An alternative is to just keep using the default MPLCONFIGDIR
(~/.matplotlib) and put up with the risk of a matplotlibrc file doing
bad things. That's my plan for now since I know few users who bother to
set exotic things in their matplotlibrc files, and my application
already explicitly set the important settings.
-- Russell
···
Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker@...236...> wrote:
On 10/25/10 1:41 PM, Daniel Hyams wrote: