Ironing out some issues with nbextension/serverextensions in notebook 5.0 and 4.x

[Brian Granger]

Hi all,

We have just released notebook 4.3.1 and are starting to look towards
a notebook 5.0 release. We have a number of small issues related to
the installation and enabling of nextensions and serverextensions in
the 4.x release series and 5.0/master.

Because the notebook 5.0 will likely be the first notebook release to
simultaneously support jupyterlab 1.0, I think it is important to iron
out some of these problems before its release.

Here are the currently open issues that I know of related to this:

https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1992
https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1797
https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1706
https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1617
https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1508

I would like to have a video meeting about these issues after the new
year. In the meantime, let's use this email thread to try to better
understand the big picture of what needs to get done for 5.0.

IMPORTANT: I know we are wanting to move towards a completely
different approach (the so called "conf.d" approach), but I don't
think we can delay notebook 5.0 for that release. Also recent work by
Sylvain suggests we may want to wait to do that once the server is its
own separate repo/project.

Cheers,

Brian

--
Brian E. Granger
Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
@ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub
bgra...@calpoly.edu and elli...@gmail.com

[Brian Granger]

And to answer my own questions:

* Consistent handling of sys-prefix, system and user options
- Which is default?
- Which has priority?
- How are they combined into the final config
* Make it easy to disable or uninstall all extensions for system/sys-prefix/user

Cheers,

Brian

[Brian Granger]

Pinging everyone on this one again...we need to resolve this stuff
before notebook 5.0 goes out the door...

[Min RK]

Thanks, Brian. I think a lot slipped through during the holiday.

-Min

[Sylvain Corlay]

Hi Brian,

The JEP on the Jupyter server 

    https://github.com/jupyter/enhancement-proposals/pull/21

proposes semantics on prioritization and defaults for system vs sys-prefix vs user installation.

There has already be some discussion on this in this PR.

Sylvain

[Brian Granger]

Looks like discussion is happening here:

https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/2141