This looks like a valuable improvement -- only testing in lots of different environments will tell whether it's introducing new obnoxious bugs ;)

One immediate problem:

› python setup.py build
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 88, in <module>
    mpl_packages['libAgg'],
KeyError: 'libAgg'

One concern: There seems to be a lot of code duplication between the PkgConfig and FreetypeConfig classes. The intent of the PkgConfig class was to be useful for pkg-config and "pkg-config-based" tools, like "freetype-config" -- I see now that had some bugs, but I wonder if we couldn't fix that by inheriting from PkgConfig and reusing the common functionality, rather than copy-and-pasting it. Certain methods, like PkgConfig.setup_extension were hard to get right and I suspect it will need to be updated in the future... better to do that only in one place. Also, I only recently became aware of libpng-config, which maybe should be used for finding png instead of pkg-config directly as well -- so we have at least three of these things now.

Speaking from experience, this sort of configuration stuff is always deceptively fiddly, so thanks for taking the time with it.

Note #2331 will probably force a bit of a refactor over here. #2331 is likely to go on the maintenance branch, but I don't think this (which cuts deeper) necessarily should.

Thanks for taking a look at this. Good point on removing code duplication. PkgConfig and FreetypeConfig (probably LibpngConfig eventually), should try to share as much of the same implementation as possible. This should wait for the next version to get as much testing abuse as possible before being released into the wild. I'll rebase off of master after #2331 lands.

Is there a decision for when MPL drops python 2.6 support? I like the OrderedDict interface, but it showed up in 2.7. Assuming 2.6 support is sticking around, is there any issue with packaging the OrderedDict recipe?

This deserves another another discussion, but I think this PR starts laying the infrastructure to download/build/statically-link libpng/freetype if they are not found on the system. At least on *nix-like platforms.

I think Python 2.6 is still reasonably important -- 24% of our users responded they were using it in our survey. The complication here is that the ordered dict would have to be available during build time, and I'm not crazy about increasing the size of the build code by too much. You could go back to using a list, and just creating local references to the entries that matter that are used multiple times (agg, cxx, freetype etc).

And yes, having auto download/build/link of freetype and png would be great -- it's the biggest barrier to entry when building from source.

Is #2331 merged into master? I saw it land in the maintenance branch.

I just merged it now.

@mrterry - would you mind rebasing, and we can get on and merge this.

Cheers,

@mrterry Seems to have gone quiet, you want to adopt this @pelson ?

@pelson Unless you want to adopt this, I am going to punt this to 1.4.x

@mrterry I am closing this as it is over a year old and there have been a good number of other changes to setup.py between now and then. I suspect re-basing this branch would be more work than just re-doing it.