matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Hi Michael,

Thanks for reading the MEP! Responses below:

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:

>  On 12/10/2012 05:18 PM, Tony Yu wrote:
>
> <snip>

> MEP 12 outlines the reorganization of the example gallery and subsequent
> clean up of the examples:
>
>
>      https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP12
>
>  In my opinion, there are two open questions in the MEP:
>
>      * Section names (may seem trivial to some, but I think it's really
> important)
>     * Guidelines for cleaning up examples
>
>  Some thoughts:
>
> You suggest keeping the old examples around in some dark corner.  Is there
> some advantage you envision for doing this?  I'd just as soon remove them.
> Note that the documentation on the website is now versioned, so the
> examples that shipped with 1.2.0 will remain live and unchanged
> indefinitely.  If a user wants the older gallery it should just be there
> under matplotlib.org/1.2.
>

I noted that old examples could either be kept in a dark corner, or
deleted. I'm actually strongly in favor of deleting, especially since the
website is versioned (nice---I didn't know this). I was afraid some people
would be resistant to deleting, but I'm happy to hear that you prefer it.
I'll make this preference clearer in the MEP.

As for the categories/structure, I think I prefer your "suggested
> alternative" -- to have narrowly defined categories rather than a big
> "plotting" directory.
>

I agree that "plotting" is too general. My only hesitation with the finer
classification of plots is that it's really hard to come up with categories
that work; my current suggestions in the MEP aren't really ideal.
Nevertheless, I'm sure we can all put our heads together to come up with
categories that make sense...



> For "cleanup guidelines", perhaps it is worth mentioning that some of the
> examples are really unit tests -- they just exercise some esoteric feature
> that's only of interest to developers.  These should be converted into unit
> tests from the framework and probably deleted altogether as gallery
> examples.
>

Agreed.

Maybe we should also add that examples should be renamed when appropriate:
> there are things like "image_demo.py" and "image_demo2.py".  The "2"
> doesn't really help to describe what's in there.
>

I definitely agree.

I'm not sure I agree with "one figure per example" as a goal -- it is
> sometimes nice to have a number of features demonstrated by a single
> example file, and cramming them all into multiple axes isn't always the
> best approach.  I think we can take that on a case-by-case basis.
>

I was hesitant to add this initially. I agree it's sometimes a good idea to
have multiple figures. I'd still like to have this as a suggestion---I'll
try to make that a little clearer in the MEP.


>  I agree with Phil that we might as well just iterate this on master.  I
> would envision one or two PRs to get the general infrastructure in place,
> and then lots of PRs from multiple authors as we work on whipping the
> examples into shape.
>

Sounds good.

Best,
-Tony

Hi Russell,

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Russell E. Owen <ro...@uw...> wrote:
> I have not yet made them, but it's on my to do list. One problem is that
> there are so many flavors of Python 3 (version 3.2, version 3.3, each in
> two flavors: for MacOS X 10.5 and later and for MacOS 10.6 and later).
> Anyone have suggestions for easily building against multiple versions of
> python?

thanks for the info, I totally understand the effort involved and
we're all super grateful that you put in this work in the first place!

Best,

f

In article 
<CAHAreOoB8coDnyvU1Zq2iOdGqYr2p2t-m=gV=uV5...@ma...>,
 Fernando Perez <fpe...@gm...> 
 wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> quick question; on the downloads page
> (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/downloads) I only see py27
> OSX binaries; is there any official location for Py3 ones?  I just had
> a colleague ask me about them and I couldn't find any in the places
> I'm used to searching for (github, pypi, superpack).

I have not yet made them, but it's on my to do list. One problem is that 
there are so many flavors of Python 3 (version 3.2, version 3.3, each in 
two flavors: for MacOS X 10.5 and later and for MacOS 10.6 and later). 
Anyone have suggestions for easily building against multiple versions of 
python?

- Russell

On 12/10/2012 05:18 PM, Tony Yu wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm not sure if non-core-developers are allowed to post MEPs, but I 
> just did ;).

It's a big tent.  Come on in!  BTW -- if you want to have access to the 
big green merge button, let me know.  You've certainly been working on 
matplotlib long enough, to say the least.  :)

> MEP 12 outlines the reorganization of the example gallery and 
> subsequent clean up of the examples:
>
> https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP12
>
> In my opinion, there are two open questions in the MEP:
>
>     * Section names (may seem trivial to some, but I think it's really 
> important)
>     * Guidelines for cleaning up examples
>
Some thoughts:

You suggest keeping the old examples around in some dark corner.  Is 
there some advantage you envision for doing this?  I'd just as soon 
remove them.  Note that the documentation on the website is now 
versioned, so the examples that shipped with 1.2.0 will remain live and 
unchanged indefinitely.  If a user wants the older gallery it should 
just be there under matplotlib.org/1.2.

As for the categories/structure, I think I prefer your "suggested 
alternative" -- to have narrowly defined categories rather than a big 
"plotting" directory.

For "cleanup guidelines", perhaps it is worth mentioning that some of 
the examples are really unit tests -- they just exercise some esoteric 
feature that's only of interest to developers.  These should be 
converted into unit tests from the framework and probably deleted 
altogether as gallery examples.

Maybe we should also add that examples should be renamed when 
appropriate: there are things like "image_demo.py" and 
"image_demo2.py".  The "2" doesn't really help to describe what's in there.

I'm not sure I agree with "one figure per example" as a goal -- it is 
sometimes nice to have a number of features demonstrated by a single 
example file, and cramming them all into multiple axes isn't always the 
best approach.  I think we can take that on a case-by-case basis.

I agree with Phil that we might as well just iterate this on master.  I 
would envision one or two PRs to get the general infrastructure in 
place, and then lots of PRs from multiple authors as we work on whipping 
the examples into shape.

Note that I haven't started doing this yet, but I will probably start 
periodically posting built documentation of master on the website -- 
that should make it easy for anyone to preview the new gallery and 
provide feedback as we work.

Cheers,
Mike

On 10 December 2012 22:43, Tony Yu <ts...@gm...> wrote:

> This MEP only concerns the main gallery. I think user-contributed examples
> were (are?) the intended focus of SciPy Central:
>
>     http://scipy-central.org/
>
> (and before that, the SciPy Cookbook). I'm not sure about the status of
> SciPy Central. There was talk of a redesign, but I haven't seen any
> progress since then.
>

We (IPython) contacted the maintainer of Scipy Central. The picture is
roughly that he doesn't have time to maintain it, but is happy to transfer
the codebase and content (and server? I can't remember) to anyone who's
interested.

We've also got an idea about making a site for sharing code samples based
on http://nbviewer.ipython.org/ , as the notebook is a format that really
lends itself to this sort of thing.

Best wishes,
Thomas

Hi folks,

quick question; on the downloads page
(https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/downloads) I only see py27
OSX binaries; is there any official location for Py3 ones?  I just had
a colleague ask me about them and I couldn't find any in the places
I'm used to searching for (github, pypi, superpack).

thanks,

f

Thanks a lot for this MEP and I would gladly contribute to the new gallery.

From my own experience with the current gallery, I would recommend to have simple scripts that illustrate one feature only, it make things more clear IMHO. From my attempt at making some alternative gallery (http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/coding/gallery/), I would also recommend a standard size for figures unless a different size is strictly necessary.

For section names, maybe we can use several different schemes with same figures ?

Also, one important thing is to have a page with all the figures such one can browse visually all the examples.


Nicolas


On Dec 11, 2012, at 0:00 , Tony Yu wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Paul Hobson <pmh...@gm...> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Tony Yu <ts...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm not sure if non-core-developers are allowed to post MEPs, but I just did ;). MEP 12 outlines the reorganization of the example gallery and subsequent clean up of the examples:
> 
>     https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP12
> 
> In my opinion, there are two open questions in the MEP:
> 
>     * Section names (may seem trivial to some, but I think it's really important)
>     * Guidelines for cleaning up examples
> 
> I've added proposed section names and clean-up guidelines to the MEP, but I'm sure these will evolve over time.
> 
> Best,
> -Tony
> 
> 
> Here here! I've been waiting for a really nasty, cold, and rainy weekend here in Portland to make some PRs at least cleaning up the code contained within the examples. Just hasn't happened yet ;)
> 
>  Tony, if you make your own branch for this, I'd be happy to contribute.
> -paul 
> 
> Awesome! I'm hoping we can quickly converge on some clean-up guidelines and section headings. 
> 
> I was envisioning a single PR that adds new gallery sections. After that examples would be updated over a long period of time in multiple PRs that change a few examples at a time. Do you think that all the work should be done on a parallel branch and merged in one big PR?
> 
> Best,
> -Tony
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> I'm not sure if non-core-developers are allowed to post MEPs, but I just
did

Yes please... The more the merrier!
Aren't you a core dev anyway Tony? :-) You've certainly contributed some
really valuable features, and even if you don't have access to "the big
green button" in my eyes you feedback and input are just as valuable.

The gallery was one of the key features that pulled me into mpl, but it
definitely needs a bit of TLC. The timing is quite convenient for me as I
am about to (in the next month or so) embark on implementing a gallery for
a project I'm working on that makes heavy use of matplotlib (cartopy:
http://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/).

One thing I was considering doing in my implementation was allowing
multiple tags for each example by adding some extra module level
information (in a list called "__tags__" perhaps) rather than focussing on
a directory structure to provide the tag as the current implementation of
the gallery does (and as far as I can see, the MEP recommends this too).

In the past I have also worked on a gallery extension which uses the
docstring of the example to provide a richer explanation of what is going
on (example:
http://scitools.org.uk/iris/docs/latest/examples/graphics/COP_1d_plot.html).
An alternative approach which has worked well for me is the walked through
examples found in scikits-learn (their website is down, but most of the
examples are good in that regard) which could be done via an iPython
notebook for the annotations.


> Do you think that all the work should be done on a parallel branch and
merged in one big PR?

Personally, I'm not in favour of that. We would have to make sure that the
pull requests related to this change don't start to stack up, but I think
we can definitely do this sequentially once the appropriate machinery is in
place.

Thanks for bringing this subject up,

All the best,

Phil




On 10 December 2012 23:00, Tony Yu <ts...@gm...> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Paul Hobson <pmh...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Tony Yu <ts...@gm...> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm not sure if non-core-developers are allowed to post MEPs, but I just
>>> did ;). MEP 12 outlines the reorganization of the example gallery and
>>> subsequent clean up of the examples:
>>>
>>>     https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/MEP12
>>>
>>> In my opinion, there are two open questions in the MEP:
>>>
>>>     * Section names (may seem trivial to some, but I think it's really
>>> important)
>>>     * Guidelines for cleaning up examples
>>>
>>> I've added proposed section names and clean-up guidelines to the MEP,
>>> but I'm sure these will evolve over time.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> -Tony
>>>
>>>
>> Here here! I've been waiting for a really nasty, cold, and rainy weekend
>> here in Portland to make some PRs at least cleaning up the code contained
>> within the examples. Just hasn't happened yet ;)
>>
>>  Tony, if you make your own branch for this, I'd be happy to contribute.
>> -paul
>>
>
> Awesome! I'm hoping we can quickly converge on some clean-up guidelines
> and section headings.
>
> I was envisioning a single PR that adds new gallery sections. After that
> examples would be updated over a long period of time in multiple PRs that
> change a few examples at a time. Do you think that all the work should be
> done on a parallel branch and merged in one big PR?
>
> Best,
> -Tony
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support
> Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services
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