[IPython-dev] Proposal: soft moratorium on re-architecting for 5.0

[Jason Grout]

On 6/26/15 19:45, Fernando Perez wrote:
> While I hear very much the spirit of what you are saying, and I
> certainly think that we can't lose sight that the *only* thing that
> ultimately matters is whether we serve our users well or not, there's a
> big piece that is already burning under us that probably can't wait.  In
> fact, at the last dev meeting, Jason already posted his new draft code
> in this direction:
>
> https://github.com/jasongrout/phosphor-notebook

I just wanted to mention that I support what Fernando, Brian, and Chris 
have said about moving forward with refactoring the notebook. We're 
making good progress, even while still ramping up.  For example, Steven 
Silvester has put a lot of work recently in porting over the kernel 
javascript to Typescript and phosphor (along with dependencies):

https://github.com/jasongrout/phosphor-notebook/pull/2

I just put in an in-progress pull request for documenting the API for 
kernels, kernelspecs, and sessions (which I realized when looking at the 
kernel javascript file was woefully undocumented/incorrectly 
documented): https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/pull/173. This shows 
our refactoring work is also having an immediate direct impact on the 
current notebook as well.

In another message on this thread, Min suggested having a 5.x branch for 
further development, like the phosphor notebook.  For now, I think the 
phosphor notebook can proceed as a separate project - it's totally a 
front-end thing at this point, and we're doing enough code clean-up and 
rewriting from js to typescript that I think it's all right to start in 
a fresh repo.  Which brings up another point:  can we make an official 
Jupyter repo for the phosphor notebook work, rather than using my 
personal repo?  I'm happy to continue hosting 
https://github.com/jasongrout/phosphor-notebook/ in my personal github 
account for the time being, or set up a temporary organization so we can 
collaborate more effectively, but I think it would make more sense to 
bump it up to an experimental repo in the jupyter github organization, 
developed in parallel with the current notebook.

Thomas, one thing to consider is that us working on a phosphor notebook 
doesn't preclude interested people from enhancing the existing notebook 
in the short term.  We'd like the phosphor notebook to get to a 
comparable state with the current notebook as quickly as possible, but 
it will still take some time.

Also, I totally agree with Thomas that dogfooding the notebook (and 
watching/helping others actually use it to get work done) is *extremely* 
important to understanding what we want here. And I also agree with 
others on this thread that documentation is sorely lacking.  We'll be 
working on that in the phosphor notebook as we go along too.

Thanks,

Jason
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