I'd like to suggest that dev-python/matplotlib has it's deps improved. At least of dev-python/pycxx media-fonts/texcm-ttf media-fonts/stix-fonts dev-python/pyparsing I don't think any of them should be a dependency. No such thing is mentioned by matplotlib. Second I appreciate finer control over the configuration. Matplotlib really hasn't got a lof of configuration options and it would be nice, if most of them were made available through USE-flags, in particular choosing the drawing backend to be AGG GtkAGG or Cairo Reproducible: Always
Those deps aren't noted in the tarball, as tarball contains its own copies of them. As for the second part, ebuild already does that - well, it enables agg and non-agg variants at the same time, but other than that, it's covered.
The documentation of the tarbal makes mention of bundled packages and none of the above program names is mentioned. Can you please cite a source which confirms that those packages are bundled yet not mentioned in the documentation?
matplotlib-1.0.1/CXX matplotlib-1.0.1/lib/matplotlib/pyparsing.py matplotlib-1.0.1/lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts Did you even try to read the ebuild ?
The pyparsing.py (which I think is what you are referring to) that comes with the package is 148k in size. The pyparsing package wants to download is about 1.3M in size. Same with the fonts which are arround 700k and 2.7M are downloaded.
Most of the overhead are docs and build system - former doesn't need to, later doesn't get installed.
Thanks