@tacaswell@mdboom
Need some pointers on how to resolve failing tests

1. The autogenerated pyplot.py file has the prefix "u" appended to all string type function arguments. I can manually edit these to remove the prefix "u", but that would defeat the purpose of an autogenerated file. How do I fix this?
2. I am getting an asserting error, which seems to be unrelated to the changes I made...

======================================================================FAIL: Github issue #1256 identified a bug in Line.draw method----------------------------------------------------------------------Traceback (most recent call last):  File "/home/travis/virtualenv/python2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/nose/case.py", line 197, in runTest    self.test(*self.arg)  File "/home/travis/virtualenv/python2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib-1.4.x-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/matplotlib/testing/decorators.py", line 110, in wrapped_function    func(*args, **kwargs)  File "/home/travis/virtualenv/python2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib-1.4.x-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/matplotlib/tests/test_lines.py", line 58, in test_invisible_Line_rendering    assert_true(slowdown_factor < slowdown_threshold)AssertionError

Any idea what could be going wrong?

It seems to me as if this test could fail depending on how long it takes for the rendering function. It probably is not something caused by my changes.

I would ignore those test failures, that one pops up from time to time (free cpu cycles are not guaranteed cpu cycles).

The problem with the unicode strings come from thefrom __future__ import unicode_literals at the top of every file which is part of the python2/python3 compatibility layer. boilerplate.py does some introspection and then generates pyplot.py and (correctly) writes out all of the strings as unicode. However, this ends up being a problem because in python 3 the default in unicode strings and in 3.2 it will raise an error if you give it au'blah' string. I think last time this came up I appliedsed to the output....

@tacaswell
This is ready to be merged... its now on your plate, whenever you have the time.

I am now starting to look at the needs_patch issues.

This looks great! Thanks for sorting out the issue with boilerplate.

I am happy with these changes, but I would like@mdboom or@efiring to take a look at the changes to boiler plate.

I also don't recall of the top of my head if we want to keep all of the images for all of the tests (png might be enough).

Travis PEP8 failures are unrelated to this PR. Were modules such as animation and patches previously exempt from PEP8 testing, but recently included? Or are more PEP8 tests now being used as criteria for rejection? Or did a merge accidentally revert the modules to a much earlier state? I don't think it is the last of these, fortunately.

Oddly, one of the builds (2.7) seems to have passed even though the others failed for pep8 reasons.....

@efiring@tacaswell
The travis failure was indeed unexpected as my changes passed the Travis tests yesterday (after the second last commit). My last looks completely harmless/unrelated to any kind of tests.

I have no idea of any modules being PEP8 exempt. I jumped on the matplotlib dev bandwagon last week and this is literally my first PR to this repo. Also, I don't see any merge related changes in the diff for this PR.

@sfroid See#2930 . The issue is that pep8 bumped it's version today which seems to have introduced a bunch of new tests. I suspect the one that passed got a cached copy of the old pep8 install.

@tacaswell@efiring
What is the suggested solution here? Fix all the pep8 reported issues (334 in all, but each of them quite simple)?
Or do we have another way to handle this?

The other PR squelches the tests that we did not run before.

Please don't start fixing pep8 issues in this PR, if we are going to do that we should do it in a dedicated PR. Style conflicts are the worst to merge.

Yayy!! My first contribution to matplotlib.
Thank you@tacaswell and@efiring for the help.

Thank you@sfroid for the contribution.

Thank you@sfroid !