Indeed. qa.d.o betrays me. The answer to this was delayed because I considered several times what it should actually be.
The _python_ side of ipywidgets has never been a problem, but the JS/browser side has grown in complexity considerably in recent years, and shows little sign of slowing down. The debian javascript situation has improved somewhat - it was possible to significantly simplify the labyrinthine custom build infinity0 did for ipywidgets 6 in 6.0.0-8 to mostly use logic from pkg-js-tools, and having recent versions of eg, webpack helps a lot. I don't think however there is really a useful way of providing "only" the python side of ipywidgets in debian. It's already a concern that needing to unvendor javascript and hack build processes results in a substandard experience in eg, jupyter-notebook, and I don't think it's viable to ship ipywidgets unless we can get something resembling full functionality. The javascript side is blocked on jupyterlab (#934258). I know jpuydt has done some work on it in the past, but I don't know the current state. Some other signficant building blocks like lumino (ex-phosphorjs) are now packaged. It might be possible to vendor only the needed bits of jupyterlab, as was recently necessary in jupyter-notebook (CVE fix requiring multiple new dependencies), but I think that illustrates the issue. While the python side of jupyter proves tractable, the web application side is a large, fast moving target which I have concerns about our ability to really keep up and provide a good user experience. I will certainly _attempt_ to get ipywidgets up to date during this cycle. But given missing dependencies and the time likely to be required, I don't think I can guarantee it. If it cannot be updated in a reasonable period of time, I think the question of whether it is better to drop it might arise. I appreciate there are dependencies, although I think most of them are ultimately optional. Gordon On Sun, Sep 19, 2021 at 10:52:39PM -0400, Sandro Tosi wrote: > Hello Gordon, > you've been active uploading several packages of the ipython stack in > the last few days: can you provide an update regarding ipywidgets too? > thanks > > On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 12:01 PM Sandro Tosi <mo...@debian.org> wrote: > > > > Hello Gordon, > > > > On Sat, 21 Apr 2018 10:55:29 +0200 Tobias Hansen <than...@debian.org> wrote: > > > Sagemath 8.2 uses ipywidgets 7 [1] and using version 6 causes about 80 > > > doctests to fail. > > > > do you have any plan to update ipywidgets to 7+ anytime soon? the > > upstream version currently in sid is severely outdated, being released > > more than 4 years ago! > > > > Several packages are requiring ipywidgets 7 and the lack of it in > > Debian is hold several maintainers back from updating their packages > > (I have 3 myself alone). > > > > This bug was open more than 3 years ago: please provide an update on a > > timeline for ipywidgets 7 for debian, so that we can plan accordingly. > > > > Thanks, > > Sandro > > > > -- > Sandro "morph" Tosi > My website: http://sandrotosi.me/ > Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi > Twitter: https://twitter.com/sandrotosi
