Switch tutorials to JupyterLab

[schlaicha]

According to the Jupyter project,

Jupyter Notebook is deprecated and it is advised to transition to JupyterLab.

The jupyter_contrib_nbextensions have been abandoned in favor of jupyterlab-contrib and support only up to releases 4&5 of Jupyter (current is 7!).

Although spending more than half a day I could not get a compatible chain of jupyter/nbextensions/nbconvert/exercise2 installed via pip, which means that an average user will not be able to run the notebooks as intended locally.

jupyterlab-solutions seems like the perfect replacement for exercise2 and from a brief look we would only have to search-and-replace 'exercise2' by 'solution' in the notebook metadata and adapt a few scripts.

Therefore, I strongly suggest to switch to Jupyterlab as soon as possible!

[jngrad]

Thank you for looking into this. As far as I can tell, jupyterlab-solutions is in alpha and has been abandoned by its author. The corresponding GitHub repository was deleted in 2020. I'm not sure we are gaining much compared to exercise2, especially considering JupyterLab is actively maintained and might eventually break backward compatibility.

Our notebooks and exercise2 cells are compatible with all major vendors: Jupyter Notebook, JupyterLab, VS Code Jupyter. We provide installation instructions for all of them and explain how to convert the exercise2 cells to vendor-specific cells. The JupyterLab extension migration table currently doesn't have a replacement for exercise2.

[schlaicha]

Sorry, I did not check if the package is maintained :-(

The installation instructions will not work anymore,
pip3 install --user nbformat notebook 'jupyter_contrib_nbextensions==0.5.1'
for me pulls in Jupyter-7.0 which is incompatible with nbextensions.

So you need to manually specify basically all versions (note that nbconvert again is not compatible with all versions, then there comes jupyter-server, jupyter-client, ...). Can you provide a jupyter --version for a setup which we have in the CI? Then I can try again to install...

The hint concerning how to convert the exercise2 cells to vendor-specific cells is what I overlooked.

[jngrad]

$ jupyter --version
Selected Jupyter core packages...
IPython          : 7.31.1
ipykernel        : 6.7.0
ipywidgets       : not installed
jupyter_client   : 7.1.2
jupyter_core     : 4.9.1
jupyter_server   : not installed
jupyterlab       : not installed
nbclient         : 0.5.6
nbconvert        : 6.4.5
nbformat         : 5.1.3
notebook         : 6.4.8
qtconsole        : not installed
traitlets        : 5.1.1

[schlaicha]

Thank you @jngrad , with the output of jupyter --version I could resolve everything.

Note, however, that the information provided in #4790 was not sufficient for me, resulting in

$ jupyter --version
Selected Jupyter core packages...
IPython          : 8.15.0
ipykernel        : 6.25.2
ipywidgets       : not installed
jupyter_client   : 8.3.1
jupyter_core     : 5.3.2
jupyter_server   : not installed
jupyterlab       : not installed
nbclient         : 0.5.13
nbconvert        : 6.4.5
nbformat         : 5.1.3
notebook         : 6.4.8
qtconsole        : not installed
traitlets        : 5.10.1

and thus giving an error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'jupyter_server'.

So one really needs to make sure to specify the versions for all packages mentioned above in the installation instructions.