stupid question: Why is imshow in io module?

[Stéfan van der Walt]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 5:55 AM, Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni.soma at gmail.com> wrote:
> @Josh, there's two issues here: whether the import io is wasteful (which, as
> you demonstrated, it isn't), and whether it makes sense to stick imshow
> under io, which is certainly not clear to me, despite the rationalisations
> posted to this thread. =P
>
> I would argue that we rename the "viewer" package to "view" and include a
> simple imshow in there in addition to the viewer.

This wasn't as much a design decision as evolution.  Initially, we had
a module for reading, writing and displaying images, and only later
the viewer tools came along.  Since then, we've started using
matplotlib almost exclusively for displaying images (e.g. in the
gallery), so I'd opt for deprecating "imshow" in favor of standard
matplotlib.

Having a viewer in the ``viewer`` package makes some sense, because it
adds additional functionality.  But before we put more code in there,
it would be good to figure out how to test it--any ideas how to script
GUI tests?

Stéfan