matplotlib installation

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Jean-Paul Calderone<exarkun at divmod.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:33:36 GMT, Alan G Isaac <alan.isaac at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/12/2009 5:55 AM Virgil Stokes apparently wrote:
>>>
>>> Any suggestions on installing matplotlib for Python 2.6.2 on a Windows
>>> Vista platform?
>>
>>
>> Maintainers for some packages have run into a wall
>> compiling for 2.6.  Matplotlib is one of these:
>>
>> http://www.nabble.com/binary-installers-for-python2.6--libpng-segfault%2C-MSVCR90.DLL-and-%09mingw-td23971661.html
>>
>> Another package I care about is SimpleParse, which also
>> found compiling for 2.6 to be impossible.  I do not know
>> if this was the same problem or not, but it means that
>> SimpleParse is *still* not available as an installer for 2.6.
>>
>> I assume this is of great concern to the Python community,
>> but I do not know where the discussion is taking place.
>
> Some discussion has occurred in the issue tracker:
>
>  http://bugs.python.org/issue3308
>  http://bugs.python.org/issue6007
>
> In general, the people responsible for how CPython builds on Windows
> don't seem to consider this an issue.

We got the same problem with numpy.  The good news is it is solvable
(at least partially).

http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/browser/trunk/numpy/random/mtrand/randomkit.c

Basically, there are some functions which are erroneously "declared"
in the .lib, but they don't actually exist in the MS C runtime. We
detect when the .C code is built under mingw, and add an hack to
redirect the function to the "real" function, _ftime64 (see around
line 75).

cheers,

David