Gotchas in user-space matplotlib install?

[Matt Feinstein]

>If you do a --prefix=~/usr for all 'configure' and 'python setup.py
>install' commands, and set your PATH, C_INCLUDE_PATH,
>CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH, LIBRARY_PATH, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables
>accordingly, and set the MATPLOTLIBDATA environment variable to point
>to ~/usr/share/matplotlib, it should work.
>
>When debugging your setup, you might want to run your test
>matplotlib/pylab script with 
>
>  > python myscript.py --verbose-helpful
>
>OR
>
>  > python myscript.py --verbose-debug
>
>to get extra information about where matplotlib is looking for things.

For the record, I persuaded the sysadmin to install current levels of
the tcl, tcl-devel, tk, and tk-devel libraries-- my argument was that
you couldn't get a useful installation of Python without them.

Since I used /usr/people/mrf/python24 for my home Python directory,
there were a few tweaks needed to get the matplotlib installer to find
stuff. To get access to the freetype and Numeric libraries and
what-have-you, adding /usr/people/mrf/python24/lib/python2.4 and
/usr/people/mrf/Numeric-23.8 to the basedir dictionary in setext.py
seemed to work. In addition, I think I had to copy the Numeric include
directory into an additional location. There was also a little
fiddling with PYTHONPATH to insure that the installer found both
numarray and Numeric. Didn't seem to need MATPLOTLIBDATA, but that
would have been my next try.

With a working version of Tcl/Tk, the need for other widget sets
became somewhat academic. For GTK, Fedora Core 1 is apparently so far
behind current levels of GTK that it is pointless to complain. Wx is
still a possibility.

All in all, not actually excruciating-- and now I have a working
version of matplotlib!
Matt Feinstein

--
There is no virtue in believing something that can be proved to be true.