[GRASS-dev] grass + matplotlib on mac osx snow leopard

[Hamish]

Michael wrote:
> I installed matplotlib awhile back to
> test it (Leopard). It is quite nice and very versatile. I
> thought it could be a very nice addition.

FWIW I'm already quite familiar with Matlab plotting (I use it almost
every day), so matplotlib (which is more or less a clone of that) would
be very natural for me to use. That shouldn't count for much, but I
expect I'm not alone.

> However, there were objections to another dependency and the suggestion
> that we should build our own graphing library. But this hasn't happened
> yet.

I think it all depends on the level of how much we are going to use it,
and what doors it opens. If all we need to do is create a line graph it
is probably easier to write our own. But if we want to replace d.histogram
etc. with something more fancy, and other R-like goodness we haven't
thought of yet, I don't see much point in spending a large effort in
reinventing the wheel for something far from our primary business.

As matplotlib is a close colleague of numpy (which we already use for the
wxProfile tool), I don't think it is going too much further to request
numpy+matplotlib instead of just numpy. Find the packages for one, you'll
probably find the packages for both.


2c,
Hamish