Trouble building matplotlib on Solaris 8

It would appear something else is going on here other than

    > straightforward issues of whether or not I'm running
    > interactively. Unfortunately, the wild differences between
    > the two gdb backtraces suggest that I'm going to have to
    > drag out Electric Fence or some other malloc debugger to
    > figure out what's wrong (oh joy, oh happy thought...), which
    > I don't have time for at the moment.

    > Any simpler suggestions?

Arggg. Sorry you are having so much trouble.

Two suggestions: try running different backends with a minimal script

    from pylab import plot, savefig
    plot([1,2,3])
    savefig('test')

run from the command line with

   > python myscript.py -dPS --verbose-helpful
   > python myscript.py -dAgg --verbose-helpful

and see if you get segfaults on both or either of the postscript and
agg pure image backends (taking gtk and attendant complexities out of
the loop). The --verbose-helpful information will be useful to post.

Also run with --verbose-debug which produces lots of extra
information like which fonts are being loaded etc. I have seen some
fonts which have crashed the mpl extension code, and I've tried to fix
these bugs when I find them.

If none of this is enlightening, do

  > sudo rm -rf build /your/path/to/site-packages/matplotlib

and toggle the VERBOSE flag to True in setup.py and rebuild/reinstall.
This will cause the extension code to spew lots of extra debug
information, and usually helps narrow the locus of the bad code.

Let me know...

JDH