[matplotlib-devel] namespace packages in toolkits?

[John H. <jd...@gm...>]

Do we need namespace packages in toolkits?  I recently added gtktools
and exceltools to toolkits, and got a very hard to debug error:

In [1]: import matplotlib

In [2]: matplotlib.__file__
Out[2]: '/home/titan/johnh/dev/lib/python2.4/site-packages/matplotlib/__init__.pyc'

In [3]: matplotlib.rcParams['axes.axisbelow']
Out[3]: False

In [4]: import matplotlib.toolkits.gtktools

In [5]: matplotlib.__file__
Out[5]: '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/matplotlib/__init__.pyc'

In [6]: matplotlib.rcParams['axes.axisbelow']
------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<ipython console>", line 1, in ?
KeyError: 'axes.axisbelow'

Notice that the matplotlib module which was previously imported got
changed by the import of the toolkit which declared itself a namespace
package.  Now this may be the result of mpl not using namespace
packages correctly (eg matplotlib/__init__.py should be empty save for
the namespace package or something like that) but I gotta tell ya,
this looks just plain wrong.  Had I not known that namespace packages
were funky like this, it could have taken me a long time to trace this
bug.

I am going to comment out the toolkits namespace package code until I
hear persuasive arguments to the contrary, and until we fix the rest
of mpl to work properly with them.

JDH