Prevent %pylab from clobbering interactive

[stefanv]

Currently, %pylab clobbers interactive. It's probably best not to import interactive from matplotlib at all.

WARNING: pylab import has clobbered these variables: ['interactive']
`%pylab --no-import-all` prevents importing * from pylab and numpy

[Carreau]

Seeing that (--|%)pylab should never be used and is deprecated I don't see any reason to change its behavior. Also this would break backward compatibility which is one of the only reason we still have %pylab.

I'm in favor of closing at "nothing to be done" unless someone else object.

[ellisonbg]

I think this needs more thought

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 8, 2014, at 8:05 AM, Matthias Bussonnier notifications@github.com wrote:

Seeing that (--|%)pylab should never be used and is deprecated I don't see any reason to change its behavior. Also this would break backward compatibility which is one of the only reason we still have %pylab.

I'm in favor of closing at "nothing to be done" unless someone else object.

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[stefanv]

It I deprecated? I've never seen a deprecation warning when using it.

[ellisonbg]

I am not sure if we are going to formally deprecate %pylab but we are going to never mention it again and strongly recommend people to never use it.

[Carreau]

You will just not see any reference to it in the doc except on auto generated one.
It is too troublesome to have references and we push as much as possible people from not using it in tutorial and everything.

[Carreau]

not using it in tutorial. Comment edited.

[Carreau]

Idea : replace %pylab at some point by set_next_input(<everything that pylab does>) ?

[stefanv]

Also, why not suggest to the user (print to screen) to use %matplotlib
whenever it is used?

[ivanov]

We now do that if we've clobered something:

In [1]: plt = 'pilot'

In [2]: %pylab
Using matplotlib backend: agg
Populating the interactive namespace from numpy and matplotlib
WARNING: pylab import has clobbered these variables: ['plt']
`%matplotlib` prevents importing * from pylab and numpy

[stefanv]

Thanks!