The _get_canvas function should also be removed from backend_qt.NavigationToolbar2QT as it is never used.

It looks like it got copied over from the gtk backends when the QT ones were created. In gtk this function is used to set up the subplot tool.

travis failures look to all be pep8 blank-line issues.

This probably should get an entry in api_changes.

Do we want to provide an alias to support 3rd party users who might be using it?

@tacaswell, good point that it should have an api_changes entry; but I hope we can avoid putting in aliases.

never mind, I can't read.

Sorry for the noise, I miss read.

And I was looking at the wrong example. We do use it in an example, http://matplotlib.org/examples/user_interfaces/embedding_in_qt4_wtoolbar.html , at least the toolbar should be depreciated gracefully.

@tacaswell Thanks for catching that; I was too hasty with the original PR. Both classes can be deprecated by subclassing, using warnings.warn with a mplDeprecation argument in the init. It doesn't look like we have anything fancier than this for deprecating classes.