Discussion: storage of notebook assets

[lungben]

There are several use cases for storing assets (non-notebook files) alongside Pluto notebooks:

• included data #707
• Project and Manifest files (maybe, see #142)
• Serialized notebook state (maybe, see link)

Possibilities to store assets:

a) Base64 encoded inside the notebook.jl file

Pro:

• The notebook including assets is a single file
• Easy to share by e-mail (if not too large)

Contra:

• Does not work so nicely together with version control (git) - changes in assets cause not really easy to understand git diffs of the notebook file
• It is not easily possible to extract or modify the asset files

b) Make each notebook a zip (or tar) archive

Pro:

• The notebook including assets is a single file
• Easy to share by e-mail (if not too large)
• Easy to extract or modify asset files

Contra:

• Does not work so nicely together with version control (git) - git only sees if the archive has changed, but not what parts of it. Thus, code modifications inside the notebook.jl file cannot be tracked.

c) Make each notebook a folder

Pro:

• Works nicely with version control (git)
• Easy to extract or modify asset files

Contra:

• Folders cannot be directly sent per e-mail but must be zipped beforehand. This point could be mitigated by offering a "download as zip" export option in Pluto, plus the option of opening a zip archive (compressed notebook directory) in Pluto.

Currently, my favorite is option c), but maybe there is a different option we have not thought about yet? Happy to discuss!

[fonsp]

Would it be alright to move this to our notion page? That way we can all edit the pros and cons

[lungben]

Sure 😄

[lungben]

Moved to Notion:

https://www.notion.so/Storage-of-notebook-assets-9b41d6e668ba4edcb28347a98e1ef245