I would like to use the classic style to make plots look the same across 1.5 and 2 and expected that plt.style.use('classic') would basically be a non-op on 1.5 (no visual differences), which does not seem to be the case (but is intended?).

Jupyter notebook with 1.5.2:

Gray background and larger with classic style:

Trying to reproduce the defaults with rc settings:

However, the vertical layouts in [1] and [3] still differ a little bit (can they be made byte-identical?).