Hi!
I’m developing an extension that adds new functionality through toolbar buttons and widgets.
In an earlier release, I made ipywidgets a dependency because of the widgets. Now, I want to make ipywidgets an optional dependency, so I removed it from the pyproject.toml.
When testing the package, I realized that removing ipywidgets broke it, and upon debugging, I noticed that the error came because the extension could not find the @jupyter-widgets/base JS package. After some debugging, I noticed that my package.json has a jupyterlab section and a sharedPackages subsection (I created this project from the template).
It seems like since I no longer have ipywidgets as a dependency, @jupyter-widgets/base is never installed and the package breaks, because it’s configured to share the @jupyter-widgets/base package.
What is the best way to configure my extension so the widgets feature is optional?
For now, I eliminated the sharedPackages section. This fixed the problem, but I’m unsure if this could create other issues and there’s a better way do achieve this.