[matplotlib-devel] mpl 0.65: no bdist_rpm, harcoded paths...

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

hi all,

A few minor nits with mpl 0.65:

1. I just tried to build an rpm for mpl via bdist_rpm, and it unfortunately
fails.  The problem is the extra -debuginfo rpm which gets generated in the
process, which then causes the setup.py process to abort.  It would be very
nice to be able to use bdist_rpm to cleanly generate RPMs out of the sources,
for handling installation via yum on multiple boxes.

2. I think there are some hardcoded paths in mpl which shouldn't.  I installed
   it (after the rpm failure) with 'install --prefix=/usr/local', and the date
demos fail:

planck[examples]> python date_demo1.py
Could not find bitmap file "/usr/share/matplotlib/home.xpm"; dying

Note that:

planck[examples]> d /usr/local/share/matplotlib/home.xpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root 5135 Jul 20 12:13 /usr/local/share/matplotlib/home.xpm

which is as it should, since I specified my prefix as /usr/local.  The runtime
code should not assume that the base prefix is necessarily /usr, since this
can be changed at installation time by the user.

3. The dates stuff also has problems when running in non-english locales:

In [1]: run date_demo2.py
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
exceptions.ValueError                                Traceback (most recent
call last)

/home/fperez/code/python/pylab/examples/date_demo2.py
       20
       21
---> 22 quotes = quotes_historical_yahoo('INTC', date1, date2)
       23 if not quotes:
       24     print 'Found no quotes'

/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/matplotlib/finance.py in
quotes_historical_yahoo(ticker, date1, date2)
       61         if len(vals)!=7: continue
       62         datestr = vals[0]
---> 63         dt = datetime.date(*time.strptime(datestr, '%d-%b-%y')[:3])
       64         d = date2num(dt)
       65         open, high, low, close =  [float(val) for val in vals[1:5]]

/usr/src/build/394694-i386/install/usr/lib/python2.3/_strptime.py in
strptime(data_string, format)
      422     found = format_regex.match(data_string)
      423     if not found:
--> 424         raise ValueError("time data did not match format:  data=%s
fmt=%s" %
      425                          (data_string, format))
      426     if len(data_string) != found.end():

ValueError: time data did not match format:  data=1-Dec-03  fmt=%d-%b-%y
WARNING: Failure executing file: <date_demo2.py>

In [3]: !echo $$LANG
de_DE.UTF-8

If I switch to the US locale, the code runs (until the crash listed in #2
because of the path problem).

Anyway, this is _my_ Christmas gift to matplotlib ;)

Cheers,

f