Move notebook() into Sage

[vbraun]

Right now the notebook() function is a lazy import from sagenb. Hence any access (like looking at the docstring) imports sagenb which changes the display backend which causes various problems (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/3uaY6xHLMqQ/Zyn67xJ0LaMJ). It also doesn't fit into a world where there is more than one notebook. And its current behavior of turning the current Sage session into a notebook server can't work with the IPython notebook or SMC.

First, we should definitely move notebook into the Sage library to move it away from sagenb.

The more general question is what to do with it then. Options are

• Just let it launch SageNB, any other notebook needs to be launched via sage --notebook=... on the commandline
• Deprecate notebook() altogether
• Let notebook() always spawn an independent process, and add an argument to select which one

CC: @kcrisman @jhpalmieri @boothby

Component: notebook

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/18512

[jdemeyer]

comment:1

I wouldn't move generalizing notebook() like supporting notebook(backend="ipython").

However, like I already said on sage-devel, the fact that importing sagenb breaks stuff is a bug in itself.

[kcrisman]

comment:2

I wouldn't move generalizing notebook() like supporting notebook(backend="ipython").

I guess I could support either way - it does seem a bit bit silly not to extend this command, since in principle it could be agnostic. notebook(backend='smc'), anyone?

However, like I already said on sage-devel, the fact that importing sagenb breaks stuff is a bug in itself.

Yes.

[fchapoton]

comment:3

another ancient ticket about deprecated sagenb, can we close ?

after this one, there will remain only 100 open tickets about notebooks (new and old)

[fchapoton]

comment:5

ok, thanks