handle id keys in cells

[gmanchon]

I had not worked on a notebook for a long time and it felt awful to deal with the ids

We have discussed this before and I am not aware that a use case for these ever changing keys has appeared ?

So it would feel safe and quite practical to remove them, WDYT ?

BEFORE

me : let's look at the diff now before I commit 👀
me : oh, that's underwhelming 🙁

me : scrolling... scrolling... scrolling...
me : oh, there you are, now I can confidently scroll more to make sure everything is ok ☹️

AFTER

me : me feeling like 👨‍🎨

[gmanchon]

@krokrob looks like this repo does not have access to the Gemfury credentials

[brunolajoie]

@gmanchon what are the id for ? Is it a new thing? Dyou think they are used by any means somewhere?
Have a look at this or this maybe it brings some answers?

[gmanchon]

@brunolajoie thanks for the links. The content seems to suggest that the goal of the id field is to allow the kernel to refer to the cells either within a notebook session (during an execution) or accros sessions.

Since the ids vary every time I save my notebook, I struggle to understand how they would allow an app to reference a cell reliably accros notebook sessions.

On the contrary, if the goal is to allow an app to reference a cell within a notebook session, I struggle to understand how persisting the data on disk helps...

My best guess at the moment is that the specification is ongoing or not yet supported by all the tools of the ecosystem.

Anyways I suppose we can get rid of these changing values until we identify a pain point (if any ever emerges), in which case we will be able to quickly revert to the previous nbcleanmeta package behavior. WDYT ?

[brunolajoie]

Let's do that, but before merging, can you just check that

• notebooks
• lab
• VScode

works well with/without ids?

[krokrob]

LGTM @gmanchon I just have 1 question before merging

[gmanchon]

@krokrob @brunolajoie as a wrap-up, jupyter notebook, lab and vscode seem to work pretty well without the ids

the ids appear with nbformat version 4.5

at the moment I was not able to determine precisely what actions cause the ids to reset other than it frequently is the case when working on the lectures