@efiring Can you take a look at this? I think that this + #5106 are the 2 blockers for rc2

I've been looking at it, but I don't completely understand the sequence of events. Setting _is_idle_drawing to True in something that is not actually triggering an idle draw looks a bit hackish, but I see that it does solve the apparent problem indicated by the traceback in #5094. Your check for is_saving looks plausible, but does it cause a needed screen update to fall on the floor when saving?

I don't think it will drop a screen update as saving figures goes through print_figure instead of the GUI's draw routine. I think they are completely decoupled (as the saved figure can be at a different DPI than the screen).

The whole _is_idle_drawing construction is hacked, but is there so that draw_idle is re-entrant and we can fake asynchronous functionality with only synchronous calls (and without asyncio). This is probably also fixable by moving the figure.set_canvas(self) all the way to the bottom below the self._is_idle_drawing = False, but that will result in the canvas being drawn twice when saving a figure (once in the print_* method and once from the auto-redraw). Doing it as currently done in this PR will suppress the auto-redraw.

Another option is to remove set_canvas from the set of things that trigger the stale flag.

I don't object to the changes you already have in here; but your last suggestion sounds good, too. Having set_canvas trigger the stale flag seems pointless. I had actually missed this key point, that it is the set_canvas call in __init__ that is causing the problem in the first place--correct?

Yes, but it seems something else is going on, I threw a print statement in Figure.draw and got this:

>>> import matplotlib              
>>> matplotlib.use('svg')          
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
>>> plt.ion()                      
>>> plt.plot(range(3))             
[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x7f37e065acc0>]
>>> plt.savefig('test.png')        
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
drawing
>>> 

644b4b2 fixed the excessive drawing issue:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('svg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.ion()
plt.plot(range(3))
plt.savefig('test.png')

(dd_35) ✔ /tmp 
19:05 $ python blarg.py
drawing
(dd_35) ✔ /tmp 
19:06 $ 

12:44 $ git diff
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/figure.py b/lib/matplotlib/figure.py
index b640fed..a85626d 100644
--- a/lib/matplotlib/figure.py
+++ b/lib/matplotlib/figure.py
@@ -1052,7 +1052,7 @@ class Figure(Artist):
         Render the figure using :class:`matplotlib.backend_bases.RendererBase`
         instance *renderer*.
         """
-
+        print('drawing')
         # draw the figure bounding box, perhaps none for white figure
         if not self.get_visible():
             return

This is looking better now! I see that the pyplot.draw() docstring is out of date; it doesn't reflect all the new stale handling. Is there actually any need for it at all now, apart from backwards compatibility? I think that if the stale handling is fully functional, then pyplot.draw() could even be implemented as a no-op.

File "/home/travis/build/matplotlib/matplotlib/venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib-1.5.0rc1+100.g3b75d4f-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/matplotlib/tests/test_backend_ps.py", line 54, in _test_savefig_to_stringio

This is the second time we have gotten this error in one Travis build on this PR. It is starting to make me wonder whether there is in fact a timing problem; but I wouldn't expect that with a non-interactive backend test. There should be only one thread, and everything should be proceeding deterministically.

plt.draw is still useful if people are sitting at a repl with interactive mode off (I don't know why you would do that, but). There are also still a non-zero number of cases where changing attributes should trigger a re-draw, but does not current.

Most of those will be caught by traitlets.

I tried re-working those tests a bit, I don't fully trust the multi-process thing that nose does.

See #5152 for why I think this is happening.

I can go either way on pulling the last commit off of this PR. I like being more explicit about the tests for it's own sake, but am not willing to argue about it ;)