Travis failure looks like a dud.

This seems like a simple enough wrapper around .get_frame().set_alpha(). I'd be happy for this to be merged.

Anybody else want to give a +1 or other feedback?

Edit: Barring minor style issues below.

Seems fine -- perhaps it's a needless proliferation of keyword arguments -- OTOH, I can see why this is a common thing someone would want to do. @pelson: do you want to ring in on this?

Both ways to get transparency doesn't work well with shadow though since shadow option assume full opacity of the legend frame.

Hmmm... should we fix shadow while we're at it, then?

This is what it looks like. It looks funny but I'm not sure what I should expect....

plot(range(10),range(10),label='hey')
legend(shadow=True).get_frame().set_alpha(0.5)

@pelson: do you want to ring in on this?

No complaints from me.

I think the shadow issue is probably fine for now... I agree -- it's not clear what it should do instead. @piti118: can you please rebase this on master so we can hit that big green merge button?

That does look funny to me, but I can understand why some might not think
it is. I have played around a lot with shadowing effects and alphas with
non-white overlays that have taught me otherwise. Try the legend in a
different color, and I think you will see what I mean.

Rebased.. I think I did it right.

Yep. Looks good. Merging.

Hmmm... I think I didn't write the change log...

Oh, thanks. I should have noticed it before merging. I should be able to merge that manually. No worries.

just pull #1677