[IPython-dev] Cell magics and extensions

Thomas Kluyver takowl at gmail.com
Wed Jun 6 20:26:18 EDT 2012


A recent pull request for a graphviz %%dot cell magic [1] brings up
some questions about our scope.

What range of extensions do we envisage shipping with IPython?
Obviously there's a lot of possibilities for the new cell magics, but
in my opinion the benefit of an extension system is that things like
this can live outside the main repository and be installed separately.

What more can we do for third party extensions? As a minimum, I think
we should have a list of available extensions, perhaps on
wiki.ipython.org .

We can easily install extensions inside IPython with the %install_ext
magic. Should we make it easier to install extensions outside IPython
- e.g. by finding a way to register them on PyPI and install them with
pip? Further ahead, if there are important extensions, would it be
easy for distributions to package them?

[1] https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/1854

Thanks,
Thomas



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