Re: [matplotlib-devel] AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'GraphicsContext'

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

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Sandro Tosi <mat...@gm...> wrote:

> My plan (as one of maintainers of matplotlib in Debian) is to keep
> uploading 0.91.x in unstable, so it can migrate to testing (the
> staging area to prepare the next stable release) when needed, and
> prepare the 0.98.x package into experimental. I need this since 0.98
> introduced API changes, and I need to let depending packages check if
> they are compatible with this new version (if not, adapting them)
> before uploading to unstable and break things.
>
> Since numpy in unstable is already at 1.1.0 (scheduled to be migrated
> in testing in few days), I try my best to have 0.98.x in unstable
> asap, so to let lenny (the upcoming stable release) ship 0.98.x!

Hi Sandro, thanks for writing and all the work packaging matplotlib
for debian.

Just to be clear on the API changes: every release of matplotlib
pretty much has some API changes which are documented in the
API_CHANGES file).  They are usually quite minor, and 95% of our users
interact with matplotlib through the pylab/pyplot interface, which is
*extremely* stable, and pretty much hasn't changed since 0.1 and
probably will never change much.

The changes affect folks who use the matplotlib API directly, which
are probably 5% of our users, who are almost by definition the power
users.  0.98 introduced significantly more API changes (and features)
than a typical major release (hence the big bump in version number)
but nonetheless these have a very minor user facing impact.  We have
nearly 100 figure generating tests in our regression suite and all of
them are passing.  The major changes to the API occur for people
manipulating transformations directly, which is almost noone.

We are certainly discovering and fixing issues now that we are getting
some users on it with the 0.98.0 release, but the majority of these
are not API issues, but plain-ol-bugs or backend version issues,
etc...  We are trying to get a bug fix release out ASAP to address
these, but we want to balance getting as many bug reports in before we
do this since none of the bugs reported thus far have been critical.

Thanks again,
JDH