Jupyter looks to distro-agnostic packaging for the democratisation of installation

When users of your application range from high school students to expert data scientists, it’s often wise to avoid any assumptions about their system configurations. The Jupyter Notebook is popular with a diverse user base, enabling the creation and sharing of documents containing live code, visualisations, and narrative text. The app uses processes (kernels) to run interactive code in different programming languages and send output back to the user. Filipe Fernandes has a key responsibility in the Jupyter community for its packaging and ease of installation. At the 2019 Snapcraft Summit in Montreal, he gave us his impressions of snaps as a tool to improve the experience for all concerned.

“I’m a packager and a hacker, and I’m also a Jupyter user. I find Jupyter to be great as a teaching tool. Others use it for data cleaning and analysis, numerical simulation and modelling, or machine learning, for example. One of the strengths of Jupyter is that it is effectively language agnostic. I wanted Jupyter packaging to be similar, distro-agnostic, if you like.”

Filipe had heard about snaps a while back, but only really discovered their potential after he received an invitation to the Snapcraft Summit and noticed that Microsoft Visual Studio Code had recently become available as a snap. The ease of use of snaps was a big factor for him. “I like things that just work. I often get hauled in to sort out installation problems for other users – including members of my own family! It’s great to be able to tell them just to use the snap version of an application. It’s like, I snap my fingers and the install problems disappear!”

At the Summit, getting Snapcraft questions answered was easy too. “Every time I hit a snag, I raised my hand, and someone helped me.” Filipe was able to experiment with packaging trade-offs for Jupyter snaps. “I made a design choice to make the overall Jupyter package smaller by not including the Qt console. Most people just want the browser interface anyway. Similarly, I excluded the dependency for converting Jupyter Notebooks to other formats via pandoc. The size of the Jupyter snap then decreased from about 230 MB to just 68 MB”. 

What would he like to see in the Snapcraft of tomorrow? “There are some technical tasks to be done for each Jupyter snap, like declaring features of plug-ins and setting different permissions. It would be nice to find a way for automating these tasks, so that they do not have to be done manually each time a snap is built. Also, it’s not always easy to see which parts of the Snapcraft documentation are official and which are from enthusiastic but unsanctioned users.” Filipe suggests that creating a ‘verified publisher’ status or certification could be an answer, helping other users to decide how they want to consider different contributions to the documentation.  

A stable Jupyter snap is now available from the Snap Store providing the Jupyter users another option to install beyond the official sources. Filipe and the Jupyter community have been working on promoting it via banners, and blogs. “Some people get overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, especially when they start Googling options. I think snaps is a way to shortcut that,” adds Filipe. He recommends that other developers who want to get to this level should also come to the Summit. “The interactions here are so quick, to the point that I felt very productive within a really small amount of time, like I’d accomplished weeks of work. It’s awesome to be here and I’m looking forward to the next one.”

Install the community managed Jupyter snap here.