Re: [Matplotlib-users] "from pylab import *" will no longer override min() and max()

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Norbert" == Norbert Nemec <Nor...@gm...> writes:

    Norbert> What about pulling all the plotting routines into a
    Norbert> separate file that can be included by anyone who just
    Norbert> wants the comfortable plotting commands without all the
    Norbert> other namespace cluttering. pylab itself would then only
    Norbert> contain lots of imports and all the namespace mangling.

I think this is a good idea, especially since is a natural way to do
it with the existing organization that shouldn't break much code.  We
already have the two modules in place: matplotlib.pylab and pylab.
The former would just export the plotting symbols defined therein and
the latter would be the namespace aggregator.  Thus pylab.__all__
would be just as it is with 0.71 (plotting, numerix, mlab,
matplotlib.dates symbols, matplotlib.ticker symbols, some colormapping
stuff) and matplotlib.pylab.__all__ would only be the plotting
commands.

Scripts which currently do 

  from pylab import *
 
would be unaffected.

There are some scripts which would be affected by these changes for
those who eschew 'import *'.  If you are getting the DateFormatter
from pylab, you'll have to get it from matplotlib.dates instead.
Basically, this would primarily affect people who are using custom
tick locators or date locators/formatters.  Of course,
matplotlib.pylab *could* continue to provide these, but that seems to
defeat the purpose of the change, which is to be more rigorous about
exported namespaces.

So the two questions are: 1) are people in favor of this change? and
2) if so, what should matplotlib.pylab export?  Only symbols defined
therein?  Or perhaps add a few for backward compatibility?  Specifically
I'm wondering if matplotlib.pylab should continue to export: cm.jet,
cm.gray, etc, date2num, num2date, drange, and perhaps the *Locator and
*Formatter symbols from matplotlib.ticker and matplotlib.dates?  I
don't suppose it's possible to "warn on import", eg warning
"matplotlib.pylab import of date2num is deprecated, please use
matplotlib.dates instead".  One could write wrappers for this, I know,
but is there some import wizardry which supports this?  

JDH