Jos?> Hi all, I have been following this list for some time, as
Jos?> well as using and spreading the news about matplotlib for
Jos?> all people I know and use python. 
Jos?> I would like also to thank all the developers for all the
Jos?> amazing work that has been done on matplotlib, it helps me a
Jos?> lot in my work.
Jos?> Now the reason why I am writing to this list is to ask
Jos?> what is the preferred policy for packaging matplotlib as an
Jos?> rpm for FC4. Yesterday was accepted in Fedora Extras and so
Jos?> it should take a few days to be available.
Jos?> The packager choose to package matplotlib (called
Jos?> python-matplotlib) with both dateutils and pytz packaged
Jos?> together while I use to package it as 3 separate packages.
Hi Jos?,
I have thought this over a bit more after talking with Fernando Perez,
a FC user, and wanted to add that in regards to the pytz and dateutils
packages, I think it is fine to package them separately. My main
motivation for including them in the distro was to keep the list of
dependencies small, and because these packages did not have win32
friendly installers; neither issue should concern the FC4 packagers.
I would emphasize vis-a-vis these dependencies that the packager
should make sure the following examples run:
peds-pc311:~/python/projects/matplotlib> ls examples/*date*
examples/date_demo1.py examples/date_demo_convert.py
examples/date_demo2.py examples/date_demo_rrule.py
and in general that the script examples/backend_driver.py, which runs
a suite of examples over several image backends, should not generate
errors.
As I mentioned in a previous response, I hope to factor some of these
dependencies into a separate, optional matplotlib-deps package to ease
the installation burden on the users while making the setup as clean
as possible for package maintainers.
Let me know if I can offer any more help, and thanks for your work
promoting matplotlib!
JDH