Upgrade to IPython 0.12

[kini]

We need to upgrade IPython to the shiny new thing. Well, not really - the shiny new thing was 0.11, and 0.12 is now stable. It's been mostly rewritten and is now a lot more modular, as I understand it. Definitely worth using in Sage.

Install IPython 0.12: preliminary spkg at ​http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/jason/ipython-0.12.p0.spkg

[jhpalmieri]

See #12167 for a related ticket: how we deal with IPython configuration files.

[fbissey]

Would be nice but we need some porting, here is what typically happen if you try to use ipython-0.12 with sage (we had several reports in sage-on-gentoo before I pinned down the version used by sage):

$ sage
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Sage Version 4.7.2, Release Date: 2011-10-29                       |
| Type notebook() for the GUI, and license() for information.        |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/sage-ipython", line 19, in <module>
    from IPython.CrashHandler import CrashHandler
ImportError: No module named CrashHandler

[kini]

Yes, obviously :) I'm just making this ticket since it is absolutely must be an eventual goal for us and nobody else has made a ticket yet, even though IPython 0.12 has been out for about three months.

[fbissey]

To be honest Fernando Perez and I talked about it on the mailing list at the time of ipython 0.11 and I said I would tell him what happens when we use ipython 0.11+ with sage because he is interested. For various reason I haven't been able to go back to it. But some sage-on-gentoo users eventually got a taste of it when it finally landed in the portage tree.

So first hurdle: do something about the crash handling.

[mhansen]

I'm working on this now, and have made quite a bit of progress. As an added bonus, making the Sage customizations to IPython is quite a bit cleaner. I should hopefully be able to clean out the mess in sage/misc/preparser_ipython.py and sage/misc/interpreter.py .

[mhansen]

This will fix #4413.

[kini]

Great, I'm glad you're on the case! :)

[vbraun]

What about zmq/pyzmq? It would really add to the functionality and I'm interested in the parallel/cluster support. But, strictly speaking, its not necessary to run ipython. Its also used in the new notebook so maybe its time for it to become a standard package?

[kini]

CCing Jason as he expressed interest on sage-devel.

[jason]

mhansen: we'd love to see your work-in-progress if it's available somewhere. I just spent some time reading the IPython docs again and thinking about how we could use it to implement the notebook hub and worker processes.

[mhansen]

I've posted patches which let Sage work with IPython 0.12 as well as cleaning up some old messy code. These should be in a state where they're ready to review.

I haven't done anything with preparing an spkg yet.

[jason]

I've updated the instructions in the description. Please correct if I messed something up.

[jason]

Just curious: do your patches work with the current 0.12, or did you base them on the current git master (or does it not matter?). On the IPython mailing list, they mentioned that 0.12 had some big bugs, so they were thinking about cutting a quick 0.12.1. Also, they expect 0.13 in about a month.

[jason]

I was thinking more about security today with the zmq messages. I think it may be more secure to have a default ipcontroller transport of IPC in a directory inside of $DOT_SAGE, rather than tcp over the loopback interface. That would be more secure in that random people on your computer wouldn't be able to try to register with the IPython hub. I emailed the IPython mailing list about it: ​http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.ipython.devel/7789

What do you think?

[mhansen]

Replying to jason:

Just curious: do your patches work with the current 0.12, or did you base them on the current git master (or does it not matter?). On the IPython mailing list, they mentioned that 0.12 had some big bugs, so they were thinking about cutting a quick 0.12.1. Also, they expect 0.13 in about a month.

I've looked at the current git master as I was making these changes, and I think these changes should work fine with what's on there. I'd be surprised if it made a difference.

[mhansen]

I just tested things against git master and everything seems fine.

[jason]

I'm trying to apply these to 5.0beta12. I think I probably got the order wrong in the description, so it would be great if you could check that. But regardless, none of the patches seem to apply to 5.0beta12 cleanly (each has rejects).

[jason]

I just tried applying to beta6 and the -scripts patch still had problems.