[matplotlib-devel] using setuptools by default

[Andrew S. <str...@as...>]

Hi All,

I've added a hopefully innocuous few lines to matplotlib's setup.py:

+
+try:
+    from setuptools import setup # use setuptools if possible
+except ImportError:
+    pass
+

This will use setuptools.setup() to install matplotlib if you have
setuptools installed on your system.  I assume that if you have
setuptools installed, you want to use it, hence the change. However, I
thought this may potentially cause issues for folks, so I wanted to
announce the change here.

This change should have no effect for those without setuptools.  If you
do have setuptools, it also means that the matplotlib data files are now
placed in the resulting .egg. I've therefore also modified
_get_data_path() in lib/matplotlib/__init__.py to support this change.

For more information on setuptools, see
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools