[Discuss] The future of the classic notebook interface

[Zsailer]

The purpose of this issue is to discuss the future of the jupyter/notebook repository.

Background: The classic Jupyter notebook interface is currently maintained by a skeleton crew of developers. On the other hand, many people still use the classic interface today.

Problem: We have a widely-used piece of software with very little developer support.

Let's have an open discussion about what to do with this project moving forward.

[Zsailer]

I'll do my best to document some of the things discussed in our weekly Notebook meetings.

[Zsailer]

A major issue is that this repository still receives a steady stream of issues and PRs, even though the project is technically in maintenance mode, meaning we'll only review bug/security fixes.

[Zsailer]

The challenge is that most of the people currently "maintaining" this repository are not frontend developers. When issues are raises in the Javascript APIs, the team lacks the experience to review/respond to these issues. Further, the Javascript is a bit outdated, so even frontend develops don't want to engage these issues.

[Zsailer]

As a result, there is a heavy push from the developer community to move this project into an archived state and encourage users to switch to JupyterLab or other Jupyter frontends (e.g. nteract, retrolab, etc.)

[Zsailer]

An alternative proposal was to offer this project as an opportunity for another team/company/group to maintain this project moving forward. There might be some team with vested interest in making sure this project stays alive indefinitely.

There was some concern raised with this idea. Handing off the project to another (possibly not Jupyter-affiliated) team puts the Jupyter brand (?, just echoing what I've heard said here) at risk.

[Zsailer]

The urgency of this issue (i.e. what to do with classic notebook) comes from a growing fear/possibility that notebook will break permanently because of decaying dependencies.

• Bower—the JS package manager that notebook uses—is deprecated.
• Tornado—the Python web server framework notebook uses—is causing bottlenecks in performance and also struggles with supporting its large user community.

Moving the classic notebook project off of these dependencies is a massive amount of work.

[Zsailer]

No matter what we decide, this issue impacts a large number of users. We'll want to carefully consider how to proceed, seek out consensus amount developers and users, and provide the necessary messaging to help everyone have a clear understanding of the future.

I hope this issue helps promote this discussion.

[meeseeksmachine]

This issue has been mentioned on Jupyter Community Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/the-future-of-classic-notebook-interface/11328/1

[Zsailer]

Another thing I've heard in this discussion is that there are key/critical notebook extensions on which many users depend, e.g. RISE, nbgrader, pixiedust, etc.

What is the story for users who depend heavily on such extensions?