cxx error when installing matplotlib 1.3 on CentOS 5.9

[ricky-rav]

I'm running CentOS 5.9 and I would like to install the latest version of matplotlib (or at least 1.2). The version of python I would like to use is 2.6.
Now, I downloaded the tarball and installed the required packages separately from their respective tarball, but I can't build (let alone install) matplotlib:

In short, it says:
/usr/share/python2.6/CXX/cxxsupport.cxx:40:38: error: Src/Python2/cxxsupport.cxx: No such file or directory
The full output is here: http://pastebin.com/7mVKZ6P5

I installed pycxx manually (latest version available on their website), but it didn't seem to get recognized by matplotlib, as it says in the output:
yes [Using system CXX (version unknown, no pkg-config info)]

Any idea on how I can fix this?

[WeatherGod]

@mdboom, I think the clue here is that it was a manual install of CXX, and
that while setup.py could detect its existence, it didn't find it via
pkg-config. Doesn't the build need pkg-config for finding the headers if it
isn't using the packaged CXX?

[mdboom]

The issue is that up until recently, PyCXX didn't include a pkg-config file of its own -- some distros (at least Fedora) included their own. Recently, the distros got together to put a .pc file upstream and then all use that. So things are better going forward... But I don't think a release of PyCXX exists with a pkg-config file yet...

I think the easiest way forward is to actually uninstall PyCXX and let matplotlib use it's local copy. We should probably add a setup configuration option to force that, but at the moment, we don't have one.

[ricky-rav]

I will try, thank you. Just to add an extra detail: matplotlib 1.2 and 1.3.0 do get installed without any problem. I only get the above error with 1.3.1

[tacaswell]

Closing this as it looks like this is an upstream packaging issue. @olgabot please correct me if I am wrong.