[IPython-dev] Widget idea: Global Parameters

[Antonino Ingargiola]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5 April 2014 12:26, Matthias BUSSONNIER <bussonniermatthias at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I might misremember and/or misunderstand , but it seem to me that theses
>> propositions have already been
>> disscussed on the ML, and that the response was that such a thing is  out
>> of scope for the time being.
>>
>> It is relatively easy to build as a standalone project and IIRC some
>> project like runipy already
>> implement theses functions. (cf copy from read me below)
>>
>
> Passing parameters from the command line isn't really the same as what
> this discussion is about. But it would also be easy to have a widget
> callback - even an interact function - which simply assigns its parameters
> to global variables. That should enable precisely the use case described,
> at the cost of a few lines of boilerplate, without needing major changes to
> the widget API model.
>

Agree with Thomas. Thanks to the pointer to runipy though, it is surely
handy in some situations.

In this use case, passing parameters through environment variables is
equally cumbersome. I manly work on windows boxes, and using bash scripts
to set the variables would not be compatible with Windows. I could try a
notebook that sets the environment variables and then calls runipy
though....

There are two issues here that can be decoupled.

One is running a Notebook with different input parameters (i.e. file names,
floats, etc...). According to Thomas comment that seems to be an easy reach
within the current widget infrastructure.

The second problem would be saving the output of the different inputs for
easy comparison. I don't know if this can be easily achieved. At the very
least, a semi-automated way to save N notebooks would be useful.

Anyway, let me congratulate for the fantastic work you made so far!

Antonio
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