matplotlib installation

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:54:14 +0900, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>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).

Thanks for pointing out one possible workaround.  I don't think this is
always applicable, though.  For example, pyOpenSSL can't be built for
Python 2.6 because OpenSSL uses localtime, another function with a similar
problem as the one with ftime.  To redirect its usage, OpenSSL itself needs
to be changed and then distributed along with pyOpenSSL.

Jean-Paul