Decide on merging strategy for retrolab into notebook

[tonyfast]

@Zsailer @jtpio let us use this issue to discuss the plans for retrolab into notebook.

[jtpio]

Thanks @tonyfast for starting this and setting up the board to track issues 👍

Pasting the meeting notes here for reference:

---

• where to handle discussions knowing we're replacing one technology with another.
• Technical steps/questions
  • Do we move retrolab into jupyter/notebook?
  • Dis-entangling NBClassic, JupyterLab, and Notebook
    • NBClassic depends on Notebook and JupyterLab depends on NBClassic.
    • Making RetroLab become Notebook 7.x forces JupyterLab to drop NBClassic as dependency or NBClassic drops it's notebook dependency.
    • Pin nbclassic to 6.x.

---

[jtpio]

Practically speaking:

• RetroLab still needs a place to track issues for development. Moving to jupyter/notebook would probably mean moving the development effort to the repo as well
• RetroLab would need to update its /retro/tree, /retro/notebooks... endpoints to /tree, /notebooks...
• Some of the dependency management issues mentioned above need to be thought through to ensure the best pip install --pre notebook experience

Apart from that, the first pre-release of notebook 7 could ship retrolab almost as is (after fixing the points mentioned above)

[tonyfast]

i think when we merge the project histories we can transfer issues from retrolab to notebook. there are enough to probably do by hand. the caveat is

You can only transfer issues between repositories owned by the same user or organization account. You can't transfer an issue from a private repository to a public repository. https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/transferring-an-issue-to-another-repository

so we'll need notebook in the jupyterlab repo to make this work.

[jtpio]

Otherwise Meeseek can create new issues on the target repo, for example: jupyter-server/jupyter_server#533

[jtpio]

While that merge implies publishing under the notebook name on PyPI, we should also consider changing the name of the underlying JS packages published to npm.

For now they are under the @retrolab organization, for example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@retrolab/application

It would have been nice to publish them under @notebook which unfortunately seems to already be taken. I have created the @jupyter-notebook organization on npm just in case for now. Happy to use something else if anyone has other suggestions.

We could also publish under the @jupyterlab organization, and add an extra prefix to distinguish the packages from the core JupyterLab packages.

[jtpio]

The RetroLab code base has been integrated in the notebook repo, and the first 7.0 pre-release is out. See the following links for more context:

• Notebook v7 scaffolding #6294
• Pre-release plan for Notebook v7 #6266
• https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/releases/tag/v7.0.0a1

Transferring issues from retrolab to notebook is tracked in jupyter/notebook-team-compass#9.

Closing as fixed, thanks all!