DOC: document that appearance is part of our stable API #23607
Merged
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This is a long standing policy (the reference I found is from 2015 and I remember that being the position when I started to work on Matplotlib in 2012) and is being documented here.
This position is consistent with our testing scheme (that strives for pixel identical renderings across platforms, Python versions, and Matplotlib versions).
Changing the default colormap (and the rest of the styling) was the proximal cause of 2.0 not being 1.6 due to this policy.
This PR is not an opportunity to debate if this should be the position we take, it documenting what it currently is. If we want to start a discussion about changing the then that must be done in a follow on PR.