I see changes to colorbar and legend! Does this mean you've added support for them?

This new new_figure_manager_given_figure method should be added to backend_pgf.py as well, right?

This pull request fails (merged 51f8ffc6 into cf7618c).

@dmcdougall: Yes. ;-)
@pwuertz: Yes. ;-)

Will do the pgf backend now.

This pull request fails (merged 7885d94 into cf7618c).

I have been developing this with python2.7, but it appears that this is not compatible with python3.2 nor python2.6. I don't have local installations of either and would have to build both from source, if anyone else is willing to get involved I would much appreciate it, otherwise it looks like I have a painful journey of building ahead of me...

I have a few python 3 fixes for you in this commit:
https://github.com/pwuertz/matplotlib/commit/0e7c6e3e65c8559254d650f9307d13ec544ba57c

Successfully pickled and unpickled a simple figure with python3 using that patch on top.

The figure from your test_complete also pickles/unpickles fine with python3, but apparently you cannot unpickle data that has been pickled with python2...

@pwuertz: awesome! I've cherry picked that commit into this PR.

Ah, hold on. In python3 you need a Byte buffer instead of a String buffer for pickle. This commit here makes the test module work.
https://github.com/pwuertz/matplotlib/commit/8753aaa894c561a8b79dacccc713e7302030fda1

I don't know if the code is now further away from being python2.6 compatible.

Also, our python editors seem to have a fight over a few whitespaces :)

As for testing on different versions of Python -- hopefully the Travis bot will start to be helpful with that. We have a number of failures on master at the moment, so it makes everything look like it's failing -- but manually expecting the results should hopefully be enough to track down whether a given pull request introduces any new failures.

This pull request fails (merged f4245bb into cf7618c).

I'm confused. How do I use travis bot? The web interface sure looks pretty, but I do not understand where to see what tests are failing where. Is there documentation?

This pull request fails (merged 1e08190 into cf7618c).

@pwuertz: Thanks for the added commit. I will need to do a bit of work to make that code python2 compatible, but that's fine. Mightn't be until Monday now though.

Given this is quite a significant code change I would be eager to merge this and then fix the python3 support in a subsequent PR. Some of the benefits of doing this:

• This PR will conflict and expire quickly. Rebasing is painful and means that a full review of all changes is needed each time.
• There are other PRs in need of some of the changes. Particularly Reduce object-oriented boilerplate for users #1125.

The biggest drawback of doing this:

• Currently, the pickle test will fail on python3 (and possibly python2.6)

Is anyone willing to merge this?

With some trepidation, but in the interest of keeping things moving, I went ahead with the merge. I suspect that will wreak havoc with many other pull requests, but being small, they will not be difficult to fix.

Woohoo! This has me a little too excited. Good work!

@efiring: Thanks for doing that: I think it is a good decision. It will certainly save me time in having to rebase (and other re-read), which I intend to invest to other mpl related things. As you can see, I have created a new PR with the feedback from this PR applied.

@dmcdougall : Thanks for the back pat. Its good to know that these features are appreciated. Do you have a particular use in mind for pickle support or is it just a general purpose "nice to have"?

@pelson Well, it is 'nice to have'. Though, in particular, it would save me a lot of time when I write a script that generates 8 figures from several 2GB data files and then a co-author tells me that there are too many yticks.

Though, in particular, it would save me a lot of time when I write a script that generates 8 figures from several 2GB data files and then a co-author tells me that there are too many yticks.

Yes. I like it. ;-) Your right: it is the general purpose - little things which will save a little bit of time time - benefits that I see this delivering most of all.