[KED-2540] Why are old versions pinned in requirements.txt?

Hello,

First of all, thank you for the great tool, I discovered that recently and I really like it so far.

Introduction

In the requirements.txt file that ships when doing kedro new, some packages’ versions are pinned, and sometimes to rather old versions. For example, jupyterlab==0.31.1 whereas the latest available version is 3.0.12

Background

I want to use Kedro with the latest version of jupyter lab, especially because the UI to add a tag to a cell is much better.

Problem

My question is: why are the versions pinned, and can I update them or is it going to break Kedro internals?

Below, I took the requirements.txt in the template. I added comments with the latest versions in PyPI if they are excluded by the requirements.

black==v19.10b0  # latest is 20.8b1
flake8>=3.7.9, <4.0
ipython==7.10  # latest is 7.21.0
isort>=4.3.21, <5.0  # latest 5.8.0
jupyter~=1.0
jupyter_client>=5.1, <7.0
jupyterlab==0.31.1  # latest is 3.0.12
kedro=={{ cookiecutter.kedro_version }}
nbstripout==0.3.3  # latest is 0.3.9
pytest-cov~=2.5 
pytest-mock>=1.7.1, <2.0  # latest is 3.5.1
pytest~=6.1.2
wheel==0.32.2  # latest is 0.36.2

[WaylonWalker]

I’ve had a lot of grief with this ipython version and always update to latest, In particular there is a conflict with the latest jedi version that cause it to error or even crash when hitting tab.

[ignacioparicio]

Thank you @FlorianGD for raising this point! We will upgrade the pinned dependencies in the 0.17.4 release. The table below summarizes the main changes we expect:

0.17.3	0.17.4
black==v19.10b0	black==21.5b1
isort>=4.3.21, <5.0	isort~=5.0
jupyterlab==0.31.1	jupyterlab~=3.0
nbstripout==0.3.3	nbstripout~=0.4
pytest~=6.1.2	pytest~=6.2
wheel==0.32.2	wheel>=0.35, <0.37

We are keeping ipython==7.10 for now to avoid the annoying notebook warnings. We will update this one as well once ipykernel master branch becomes 6.0 and is released.

I will close this ticket for now, but please feel free to reach out if you feel we should still discuss this.