These are the instructions if you just want to follow the latest Matplotlib source, but you don’t need to do any development for now.
The steps are:
From the command line:
git clone git://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.git
You now have a copy of the code tree in the new matplotlib
directory.
From time to time you may want to pull down the latest code. Do this with:
cd matplotlib
git pull
The tree in matplotlib
will now have the latest changes from the initial
repository.