DOC: add the API notes from Matplotlib discussion

Author: jklymak

docs/source/Api_Notes.md

@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+# API design notes
+
+## Current state
+
+### `fig, ax = plt.subplots()  # and friends`
+
+- To show during interactive use or in a script: `plt.show()` will show all figures that have been created by pyplot that have note been `plt.close()`d.
+- `plt.show(block=False)` will show the current figure, but continue the script.
+- works with `inline`
+- works with ipympl
+
+#### Pros:
+
+- easy to show all plots.
+
+#### Cons:
+
+- mixed in with rest of `pyplot`
+- too many figures open; must manually close the ones we don't want anymore or memory grows.  For a large jupyter notebook with cells executed many times, this can actually be substantial.
+
+### `fig = matplotlib.figure.Figure()`
+
+- cannot do `fig.show()`, but can do `fig.savefig()`
+- does not display anything in either `inline` or `ipympl`
+
+### Pros:
+
+- `fig` will be garbage collected because there are no references stored in a registry
+
+### Cons:
+
+- no way to show the figure on a GUI backend (no promotion possible).
+- ugly import.
+
+## Proposed changes
+
+### `mpl_gui`
+
+- `import matplotlib.mpl_gui as mg;  fig, ax = mg.subplots()`
+- Can be shown, but with new `mg.show([fig])` (though singleton fig could trivially be added).
+- jupyter: works without `show` in `ipympl`; does _not_ (currently) work (at all) with `inline`.
+
+#### Pros:
+
+- no global state - garbage collection on dereferenced figures
+- no connection to pyplot state-based interface
+
+#### Cons:
+
+- New import and documentation (inertia relative to pyplot)
+- `mg.show()` doesn't know what figures to show, so it must be supplied a list of figures.
+   - sometimes we create figures in loops, and assigning a different variable name to each figure to stop if from being dereferenced could be cumbersome.
+
+### `mpl_gui.registry`
+
+- `import matplotlib.mpl_gui.registry as mr; fig, ax = mr.subplots()`
+- allows `mr.show()` to be exactly the same as `plt.show`.
+
+#### Pros:
+
+- no connection to pyplot state-based interface
+- exactly same as previous pyplot interface for this type of work.
+
+#### Cons:
+
+- figures must be explicitly closed
+
+### `mpl_gui.FigureContext`
+
+This is between the two extremes, where there is no global registry, but a registry is maintained for a series of plots within a context:
+
+```
+with mg.FigureContext() as fc:
+    fig, ax = fc.subplots()
+    fig, ax = fc.subplot_mosaic('AA\nBC')
+    fig = fc.figure
+```
+
+makes three figures and shows them in a blocking manner, and then removes the registry on completion.
+
+### Top-level import?
+
+The question arose as to whether these should be top level imports eg `fig, ax = mpl.subplots()`  A choice would need to be made as to whether that is the registry or non-registry version of the new interface.

docs/source/conf.py

@@ -51,6 +51,7 @@
     "matplotlib.sphinxext.plot_directive",
     "numpydoc",
     "sphinx_copybutton",
+    "myst_parser",
 ]
 
 # Configuration options for plot_directive. See:

docs/source/index.rst

@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@
    api
    release_history
    min_versions
+   Api_Notes
 
 
 Motivation

requirements-doc.txt

@@ -6,3 +6,4 @@ mpl-sphinx-theme~=3.9.0
 numpydoc
 sphinx
 sphinx-copybutton
+myst-parser