IRkernel does not handle interrupt_message control message

[ahjota]

• I followed the official installation instructions
• I reproduced the error with the newest versions of IRkernel, IRdisplay, and repr
• I included a minimal reproducible example
• This the right repository: I think the issue is with IRkernel, not
  IRkernel/repr or a third party repository

My team deploys IRkernel 1.3.1 as remote kernels for a Jupyter-compatible notebook webapp.

We install it in a Docker image with IRkernel::installspec(user = FALSE).

Our architecture implements implements the Messaging protocol here for communicating with Jupyter kernels.

The issue we encounter is in interrupting the kernels. We send the interrupt_request message type to the remote kernel via the CONTROL channel. This works well for ipykernel, but not at all for IRkernel.

Digging into the code for v1.3.1 I see that the kernel handles only one message in the CONTROL channel, shutdown_request.

It would be nice if IRkernel could handle the interrupt_request message type the same way it does with SIGINT.

Related

This might be related to this issue with Jupyter Notebook #677

And implementation could be similar to #704 for kernel_info_request.