There is also an effort started at scipy2015 sprints by @rmorshea which is related to this. I just opened a PR (#4694) from his branch.

You should also have a look at the Container related work in #3944

Big question first, do you think this needs a MEP? I started writing this as an issue and then it became rather long, so I thought I should convert it. Looking at the scipy sprint I think we need to outline the direction, perhaps with some branches to show proof of concepts.

I took a look a brief look at #3944, a bit confused as to the difference between a Collection and a Container, I see no documentation on the api for containers... http://matplotlib.org/api/ and containers.py has very little doc. It doesn't look like a very large file, so I guess I will figure it out.

What timescale did you have in mind for this? I see you marked this as "proposed next point release", does that relate to the MEP doc, or the code itself? I imagine you don't want to get bothered with code now just two weeks before release as I imagine you have a lot of other stuff to work on. I find it hard enough just keeping up with all the notifications, every time I check this last day I see another 30 new notifications, so I thought twice about posting this PR, but as an MEP discussion document I thought it could simply go on the table for a few weeks.

On 2015/07/14 8:48 AM, OceanWolf wrote:

I took a look a brief look at #3944
#3944, a bit confused as
to the difference between a |Collection| and a |Container|, I see no
documentation on the api for containers... http://matplotlib.org/api/
and |containers.py| has very little doc. It doesn't look like a very
large file, so I guess I will figure it out.

Collections are for multiple objects that are very similar; they are
designed to take advantage of this similarity to allow backends to
render them much more efficiently than would be the case for a sequence
of individual objects. Notice how backends override the base class
rendering to gain efficiency.

Containers are for different types of object that combine to make a
complicated plot type; and/or for combining objects that are the same
type, but that don't easily go into a single collection.

Does matplotlib have a list of both ancestor and descendant classes, especially the latter? Something like this which lists the subclasses?

see http://matplotlib.org/api/artist_api.html

Not even clear we are doing MEPs anymore. I'll close but feel free to reopen if this is still being pushed somewhere...