technically speaking, it shouldn't be like that either (is version 1.1.1 greater or less than version 1.1?). There is a a module in distutils for comparing version numbers, we should use that instead.

@WeatherGod: agreed.

My understanding is that there are a lot of other bugs lurking behind that that prevent building the docs on Python 3 as well.

I am able to build documentation in Matplotlib 1.3.0 with Python 3 after fixing this TypeError.

The issue was that numpydoc did not support Python 3. Indeed, in the latest release of Numpy and in the numpydoc available from pip it still does not. However, the numpydoc in numpy master does appear to work with Python 3.

Just as a side note, the NumPy developers have split out numpydoc into its own repo: https://github.com/numpy/numpydoc

(I use NumPy 1.7.1 and numpydoc 0.4.1_pre20130801.)

@WeatherGod: Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.

There are gobs of failing plots under Python 3. We should probably put some effort into fixing them, as it also means those examples will not work on Python 3.

I've attached code that addresses the initial problem as reported by @ARFever, and then fixes a number of failing examples. There are still a few classes of errors in some of the examples, that I didn't get to (in case someone else wants to have a crack at it):

Trying to load a Python 2-created pickle in Python 3:

examples/api/date_demo.py
examples/pylab_examples/centered_ticklabels.py
examples/pylab_examples/load_converter.py
examples/pylab_examples/scatter_demo2.py
doc/users/recipes.rst

Requires PIL -- should be converted to Pillow:

examples/pylab_examples/to_numeric.py
doc/users/image_tutorial.rst

All of the units examples are failing, we should investigate

examples/units/*

examples/pylab_examples/to_numeric.py is compatible with Pillow.
doc/users/image_tutorial.rst needs to import PIL.Image instead of Image.

Apparently I previously tested only with Python 3.3.
There are syntax errors in doc/sphinxext/gen_rst.py with Python 3.2 due to u'' literals.

@ARFever: I probably won't have time to work on this over the next few weeks. If you wanted to make a PR against this one for the Python 3.2 fixes, I wouldn't object 😉

Closing this because the docs build with py3k on current master. I do not think it is worth the effort to fix building the docs on py3k on the un-sixified 1.3.x branch (as we will stop supporting it in the very near future).