DOC matplotlib versus matplotlib-base

We recently ran into this with pystan: https://github.com/conda-forge/pystan-feedstock/pull/27

Apparently, it is sometimes preferable to depend only on matplotlib-base. We might want to add a section to the special dependencies describing when and why.

@maresb has more details I think

[beckermr]

Alright. It appears we are again blocked on where we think X11 should live in the stack. This is again a case where some sort of virtual package could be useful. It could detect if the user has X11 available locally and then we can have variants of packages that depend on x11 that get selected depending on this fact. However this work is well beyond the scope here and probably needs more discussion.

In the mean time, I think simply forcing the Agg backend via an env var in the CI is the simplest solution and will help solve the big qt package dependence issue as well.

What do you think @dopplershift?

[jjhelmus]

was there discussion about python’s tk dependence?

Python depends on tk because it needs to build the tkinter package in the standard library, similar to the dependency on sqlite needed for the sqlite3 package in the standard library.

There has been some discussion on the tk packages dependency on the system X11 and if this should be changed. A good starting point is conda-forge/tk-feedstock#17