[IPython-dev] Small config puzzle

[Brian Granger]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 7:55 PM, MinRK <benjaminrk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Doing so will add 1) docuemenation and 2) typing.  Putting things into
>> > dicts removes many of the benefits of our config system.
>
>
> I definitely disagree that we should expose *all* of the little tweaks we
> make for the inline backend defaults,
> but maybe figsize and/or dpi.
>
> Remember, the RC only exists because the matplotlib default config isn't
> quite appropriate, so we tweak it.
> If any of our overrides aren't right for you, you might as well ignore the
> rest, because the margin / font
> tweaks we make are probably irrelevant if you change the figure size and/or
> dpi.

Ahh, I didn't realize that any matplotlib config information could be
in the rc dict.  We definitely dont' want to mirror theirs.

> Also, it should be possible to uncomment the existing InlineBackend.rc line
> for a no-op starting position,
> which mitigates the issue (though on checking, I see that InlineBackend is
> not included in the generated
> config files, which I will get on now.

Cheers,

Brian

> -MinRK
>
>>
>>
>> Though keep in mind that in this case we're forwarding data to
>> matplotlib, so I don't think we should be in the business of
>> documenting each of those keys from their docs.  For the entire rc
>> object we can say 'Dict of options for matplotlib', but if we handle
>> each field by hand, we'd be essentially duplicating the matplotlib
>> docs and type info (and possibly going out of sync with them).
>>
>> Plus, it then means we have to manually add code to sync each of these
>> values with the corresponding key in the mpl rc structure.  We'll have
>> say
>>
>> c.InlineBackend.rc_savefig_dpi = 99
>>
>> and then will need to manually update
>>
>> plt.rcParams['savefig.dpi'] = ...rc_savefig_dpi
>>
>> once for each field.  Right now we simply do plt.rcParams.update(c.rc)
>> and we're done.
>>
>> Granted, since we're only handling a few keys this way the boilerplate
>> isn't too terrible, but I wouldn't want to write such code for all the
>> matplotlib options :)
>>
>> The alternative is to tell users to first initialize the value with
>> the dict/list by importing the class object from our own code:
>>
>> from IPython.core... import InlineBackend
>>
>> c.InlineBackend.rc = InlineBackend.rc.copy()
>> c.InlineBackend.rc['foo'] = 'bar'
>>
>>
>> Each solution has some drawbacks, I'm not sure right now which are
>> worse...
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> f
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>
>
>
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com