I am one of the lead upstream developers of matplotlib.  We are in the process gearing up for two major releases in the next few months.  

First we will be doing a 1.5 release which will be a new feature release and has a new external dependancy (https://github.com/matplotlib/cycler) which will need to be packaged.  There is a version of cycler on pip and I plan to do a 1.0 release of cycler around/before the mpl1.5 release.

Right after that we will be doing a 2.0 release that will have no new features, but will be changing many of the visual defaults.

Is there anything we can do upstream to make your lives easier on the packaging side?

Thomas Caswell