Description
I've had to build the matplotlib documentation several times in the past couple of months, and everytime, it is getting increasingly difficult to build the documentation.
The number of packages required has drastically increased in the past year or so, including packages where the installation instruction is pretty much missing (http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/installing.html)
Having had to set up a new computer recently, I am running in many problems that I believe many core devs are not aware.
This unfortunately increases the level required for new contributors to do documentation changes. I would consider removing a bunch of dependencies…
Note that the doc/README.txt only mentions that sphinx is required, and the documentation then crashes after 5 minutes of build.
Here is an uncomplete list of packages required to build the documentation: numpydoc, basemap, colorspacious, mock, ipython (!!!!)