Looks like you're building from master. Are you able to successfully build v1.3 with Xcode 5?

I get a different error when running a build of 1.3:

ImportError: cannot import name _string_to_bool

This occurs when pylab is imported.

OK, I got a build to work using the 1.3 release. No crash.

Thanks for the diagnostic information. This is probably related to the migration from 2to3 to six (the relevant commit is f4adec7), but I could be wrong. As a test, would you mind seeing if you are able to successfully build with Xcode 5 using the patch in #2433? If so, I'll close this issue. If not, then that means there's something funky going on.

This patch does not fix the issue. Same behavior results.

Can you provide a full script that reproduces the error? (Or point to one of our examples that fails?) I'm unable to reproduce (once #2433 is applied, now merged to master).

Any plotting will cause the failure. This does it for me every time:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(range(10))

If I roll back to the 1.3 release, the problem disappears. I will try again from master incase I made a mistake in testing the patch.

Make sure you remove the build directory before rebuilding to ensure a complete rebuild of the C++ code.

This is automated in my build script, so that is not the issue.

@fonnesbeck Is this still an issue?

@matthew-brett Do you build with a version of xcode?

Yes - I build with the latest xcode - so I guess this isn't an issue.
The build logs from matplotlib-wheels give the full output if anyone
wants to check.

I am going to close this then.

@fonnesbeck ping to have this re-opened if you still have issues.

FWIW, whenever I get this, it is because I have old .pyc files in my source checkout. We moved axes.py to axes/__init__.py and any lingering pyc files can get really messed up.