Re: [matplotlib-devel] Example images broken in docs

[Fernando P. <fpe...@gm...>]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:
> Thank you for finding this!  That is indeed the case.
>
> I think we need to rework the plot generation code to avoid side effects
> by forcibly resetting state between plots.  Maybe we should just fork
> another Python process for each plot.  Darren, since (I believe) you
> wrote the initial documentation plotting code, do you have any thoughts?

Isn't that unnecessarily slow?  Why not have each plot simply make a
call to load a clean state?  rc_defaults() or somesuch?  This little
call could even be auto-run by the doc generation code, without
requiring a full process restart.

Basically I think MPL should be stateless enough to tolerate working
in a long-lived process with repeatable results. Anything else should
be considered a bug IMHO ;) (I know rcParams is precisely a stateful
system, but it should be trivial to obtain a known clean state always,
with a single call).

Cheers,

f