John, I just submitted a (lightly tested) patch to
> sourceforge which tries to detect that wxPython.h is missing.
> This situation is handled the same way a missing `wx-config'
> is, in that the build is only killed when BUILD_WXAGG is True
> (as opposed to just emitting a message when it's "auto").
OK, I just committed this. There was a minor correction
flags = getoutput(wxconfig + ' --cppflags').split()
^^^^^^^^
Checking in setupext.py;
/cvsroot/matplotlib/matplotlib/setupext.py,v <-- setupext.py
new revision: 1.88; previous revision: 1.87
'Thanks, Kevin'.replace('vi', '') <wink>