Allow semver-compatible frontend versions

[kylebarron]

In relation to the discussion about JupyterHub in #385, I've suggested to a few of my users to install anywidget on the server, then install lonboard in the client environment. Lonboard does not pin a version of anywidget, so when a new anywidget version is released, the next install of lonboard will break because the client anywidget version does not exactly match the server anywidget version.

I have reason to believe that using "~major.minor.*" works, because pydeck has been doing that for its frontend code for a while, to allow the Python code and JS bindings to be versioned separately (see 1, 2, 3).

That said, I haven't yet tested this in a JupyterHub environment. (I haven't tried to set up the development environment yet)

[changeset-bot]

🦋 Changeset detected

Latest commit: b7d0a7e

The changes in this PR will be included in the next version bump.

This PR includes changesets to release 1 package

Name	Type
anywidget	Patch

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[manzt]

Hey, just wanted to check in on this. I notice the PR is still in a Draft state. I should have some time to push it forward if that is ok with you. Thanks!

[kylebarron]

I only set it as "draft" because I hadn't figured out how to test it yet. But it "looks" valid based on what pydeck was using

Let me know if I can help at all

[manzt]

Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought it wasn't ready for review. I'll have a look and get back to you :) thanks for the contribution!

[codecov]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 97.21%. Comparing base (12ca2f8) to head (b7d0a7e).
Report is 129 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #521      +/-   ##
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- Coverage   98.45%   97.21%   -1.25%     
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  Files           8        8              
  Lines         452      502      +50     
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+ Hits          445      488      +43     
- Misses          7       14       +7     

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[manzt]

Ok, I tried this out in a few different environments (Lab, standalone HTML, Colab) and things seem to be working. The various CDN importers seem to resolve the version specifier correctly, which would be the main thing I would worry about.

I think this should be seen as a temporary fix. We should ideally separately version the anywidget frontend in the future, or figure out a way to bypass this strictness from JupyterLab all together. But in the meantime, this is great. Thank you!

[kylebarron]

awesome 🙌