Re: [matplotlib-devel] Time to delete backend_qt (QT3)?

[Darren D. <dsd...@gm...>]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:54 AM, Eric Firing <ef...@ha...> wrote:
>>
>> Is there any good reason *not* to delete support for Qt3 from master?
>> Is anyone who is using it likely to be able to upgrade to the next mpl
>> release, and yet *not* be able to install Qt4 and its bindings?  Note
>> that ipython no longer supports Qt3.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>
> CentOS5 and RHEL5 both have qt3 as part of the stock install (although it
> does look like qt4 is available).  CentOS6 and RHEL6 seem to have qt4 as
> default, with pyqt as well.
>
> Personally, I see no real reason to get rid of it quite yet as it doesn't
> seem to be much of a support burden -- yet.  If anything, we might want to
> consider putting deprecation notices for that backend in the next release.

I also think its coming up on time to retire the Qt-3 backend, but
perhaps a deprecation notice in mpl-1.2 and removal in mpl-1.3 would
be appropriate. Then again, if mpl-1.2 supports python3, maybe that
would be a good time to delete the Qt3 backend, since there is no
python-3 binding for Qt3.

By the way, Qt-5 is expected in September. Hopefully it won't require
a dedicated backend, it sounds like PyQt4 will support Qt5's QtCore
and QtGui libraries.

Darren