That's a very valid point. And since it's so little effort to remain 1.5 compatible, there seems little reason not to.
I'm the guilty party that suggested the use of a numpy 1.6 call in the converter functions--sorry about that! Chris has kindly made a PR to address the issue.
And it works like a charm, as I just tested with my "old" ;-) set-up (numpy 1.5). Build and tests work fine, the doc builds well, just perfect! I saw that you've already merged the PR, but I wanted to confirm that it works fine for me. Thanks Chris, you rock!
So, let's talk about Matplotlib--can we use version 1 yet? If not, I suggest that we at least copy over 'subplots', because this function makes it so much easier to build clean examples.
I think Matplotlib is a smaller issue, since it's only used to build the doc (am I wrong?), that is, more a developer's than a user's job. And Matplotlib 1.0.1 is packaged for the latest ubuntu. There is always the risk that people download an example, try to execute it and are annoyed by the error they get if they have an older version of matplotlib. If people start complaining, then we might copy over matplotlib's subplots and call skimage.subplots. But I think that this wouldn't discourage new users, contrary to installation problems. Maybe a sentence in the user guide on how to adapt examples for matplotlib < 1.0 could help, too. So my opinion is, yes, we could use version 1 now. Cheers, Emmanuelle