[IPython-dev] Scipy central & IPython notebook.

Brian Granger ellisonbg at gmail.com
Sun Sep 23 13:46:41 EDT 2012


Thomas,

Originally I was thinking exactly the same that that you are
proposing.  But once I saw nbviewer, my thinking changed:

* It makes no sense to reinvent a website for actually hosting
notebooks - github and friends work perfectly.  There are multiple
problems with having separate uploads onto the website:  i) the author
of the notebook has to maintain that content separately from their
original source, which is probably on github anyways ii) the uploaded
notebook won't be version controlled, so if we want to allow
versioning, we have to reinvent it, iii) when someone wants to use and
modify the notebook, they can't just fork/clone it.  In summary, we
should strongly encourage any such solution to simply use github for
hosted content.  This is part of why I so strongly support the vision
of nbvewier.
* What nbviewer should gain is the ability for users to register their
github (or elsewhere) hosted notebooks so there is a central list of
notebooks that everyone can view.  It would be nice if there could be
comments, tags, and link to different formats of the notebook.
* Given these features, what we are really talking about here is
nbviewer, not scipy-central and I think it should be developed under
that name within the IPython universe.

Cheers,

Brian

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> An idea I've had knocking around for a while is to integrate the
> IPython notebook format, and the nbconvert code, with scipy-central.
> As I envisage it, users could upload a notebook, and the server would
> automatically generate static HTML and .py formats from it. Visitors
> would see the HTML view with links to download as .ipynb or .py. One
> of the first examples I clicked on [1] includes code, descriptive
> text, equations, and a plot - pretty much a text book example of what
> the notebook does well.
>
> I've included here Kevin Dunn, the owner of the scipy-central codebase
> on Github. Kevin, does this idea sound interesting? I appreciate that
> you might not have the time to work on it (it looks like the
> scipy-central repository is a bit dead), but if someone were keen to
> tackle it, would you have time to guide them around the architecture
> of scipy-central, and would you be willing to merge and deploy that
> feature when it was complete?
>
> [1] http://scipy-central.org/item/12/3/integrating-an-initial-value-problem-single-ode
>
> Thanks,
> Thomas
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com



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