John Hunter wrote:
Hi José,
Hi John,
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 understand your motives and I agree with them. While packaging projects
for a distribution I am sure that you also understand our reasons for not
having multiple copies of the same code all over. Not just for space but
also for the ease that comes from doing the same work once, from having
bugs solved with one release instead of having to it multiple times. Also
if no code changes in a package there is no need to package it again,
increasing bandwidth consumption unnecessarily. (It is always good to be
able of dropping a green argument in the middle of an unrelated
discussion. 
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.pyand in general that the script examples/backend_driver.py, which runs
a suite of examples over several image backends, should not generate
errors.
I will be aware of this issues, but a note on documentation would not
hurt. _ And yes, I know I am asking too much. 
Also as far as I know both dateutils and pytz seem to have a slower pace
than matplotlib, so it should not be too difficult to synchronise the
packages. (Another variant of the famous last words...
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.
Thank you for your concern, to me as a packager it helps a lot to have the
collaboration of the package authors to solve the issues that show. As
users I am even more satisfied as I have an easy to update, and having a
close to upstream, of my favourites modules for python. I am serious here.
Let me know if I can offer any more help, and thanks for your work
promoting matplotlib!
It is a fine piece of software and the interest from other projects is not
a random event.
···
JDH
--
José Abílio