René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"[ENH]: Provide a way to avoid subcommands on import.","articleBody":"### Problem\n\ntl;dr: I'd like to be able to avoid `from matplotlib import pyplot as plt` invoking subprocesses at import time.\r\n\r\nMore generally: we often run jobs which involve a transitive import of matplotlib; for reasons I do not fully understand, we see rare but regular flakes where the process hangs during import, specifically [at this line](https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/74c7f9a598c4e32b3f551f75ed965f446d786ab1/lib/matplotlib/font_manager.py#L256) where matplotlib first invokes `fc-list`. The code is written to be robust to `fc-list` not existing, but here it's the existence check itself that's causing trouble.\r\n\r\nI'd like to be able to disable that call; in general, I suspect \"this library is running subcommands during package import\" may well cause these sorts of problems in other environments, so I suspect this would be helpful to other users as well.\n\n### Proposed solution\n\nI've got a quick first pass at the type of change I'm describing at https://github.com/craigcitro-ant/matplotlib/commit/46d64f26977c5a37074ece74d602051da2df09e7; if that looks acceptable, I'm more than happy to clean it up and send a PR. (The main thing that's missing is adding a mention to the docs.)","author":{"url":"https://github.com/craigcitro-ant","@type":"Person","name":"craigcitro-ant"},"datePublished":"2024-06-28T18:30:27.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":4},"url":"https://github.com/28488/matplotlib/issues/28488"}