ENH: add %gui support for Qt6 - #1054

Thanks for working on this @shaperilio!

@ccordoba12, mind taking a look at this and/or testing against Spyder?

In case it helps, I've published a notebook I used to test functionality. Each "case" should be run on a fresh kernel.

It would be nice to turn these into unit tests, but I'm afraid setting those up is over my head. I'd be happy to take a stab at it if someone can point me in the right direction.

I'm playing with this in Linux now and have become aware that IPython is not quite there. I guess I got mixed up yesterday while working on ipykernel. See this issue.

Effectively, the logic here is not in IPython, i.e. if you request %gui qt6 in straight IPython, it will never try to use PySide6. Since ipykernel defers to IPython to import Qt, I'm thinking the logic should be all in one place (and probably IPython). Any thoughts?

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/1d2abe7ab909ebca32908694fc3e3828c37cf11d/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_backends_interactive.py#L24-L68 this and matplotlib.testing.subprocess_run_helper may be a useful pattern to copy.

I wrote a bit of a unit test, but it won't run unless we make the CI install a couple of versions of either PyQt or PySide. How do I do that / do we want that?

We can create a coverage matrix:

diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 9904b54..05be2c2 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -62,6 +62,7 @@ cov = [
   "curio",
   "trio",
 ]
+pyqt5 = ["pyqt5"]

 [tool.hatch.version]
 path = "ipykernel/_version.py"
@@ -92,6 +93,15 @@ features = ["test", "cov"]
 test = "python -m pytest -vv --cov ipykernel --cov-branch --cov-report term-missing:skip-covered {args}"
 nowarn = "test -W default {args}"

+[[tool.hatch.envs.cov.matrix]]
+qt = ["qt5", "qt6"]
+
+[tool.hatch.envs.cov.overrides]
+matrix.qt.features = [
+  { value = "pyqt5", if = ["qt5"] },
+  { value = "pyqt6", if = ["qt6"] },
+]
+
 [tool.hatch.envs.typing]
 features = ["test"]
 dependencies = ["mypy>=0.990"]

So when you call hatch run cov:test, it would run with each variant.

You can run just one variant locally as hatch run cov.qt5:test

OK, I think this is ready! I've put code in this pull request to IPython which replicates the behavior here.

The only difference is that, in IPython, 'qt4' is an alias to 'qt', so you can never explicitly get a Qt4 / PySide event loop there. That's not the case here. I left the behavior in IPython because I don't know the history of that alias.

@blink1073 sorry about that - I had removed the windows skips because those tests passed fine on my windows machine.

I had removed the windows skips because those tests passed fine on my windows machine.

No worries! Not sure why they hang in CI then, but things like that happen for other platforms too. 😄

@blink1073, this PR broke the %matplotlib qt magic in Spyder (detected by one of our tests). So, could you yank it on PyPI? I'm still investigating how to fix it (along with other problems I found with this approach).

Yanked

Thanks @blink1073! And sorry for not reviewing it on time, I'm finishing a Spyder release right now.

I'd love to add spyder as a downstream test, how feasible do you think that is?

That'd be great! Thanks for the offer. I think adding our Spyder-kernels test suite shouldn't be that hard.

As for the Spyder tests (which also exercise our kernel under different scenarios), we could only run a file called test_ipythonconsole.py (I could give you a hand with that one because it's harder to setup).

BTW, I found a simple way to solve the regressions introduced by this PR. I hope to submit a fix in the next couple of days, after testing that change against our two test suites.

Great, thanks!

Thanks y'all; @ccordoba12, let me know if I can be of any help.