apache/spark — pull request #294 by mateiz (2014-04-02 03:05:04+00:00)
Title: [SPARK-1134] Fix and document passing of arguments to IPython

This is based on @dianacaroll's previous pull request https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/227, and @joshrosen's comments on https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/38. Since we do want to allow passing arguments to IPython, this does the following:
* It documents that IPython can't be used with standalone jobs for now. (Later versions of IPython will deal with PYTHONSTARTUP properly and enable this, see https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/5226, but no released version has that fix.)
* If you run `pyspark` with `IPYTHON=1`, it passes your command-line arguments to it. This way you can do stuff like `IPYTHON=1 bin/pyspark notebook`.
* The old `IPYTHON_OPTS` remains, but I've removed it from the documentation. This is in case people read an old tutorial that uses it.

This is not a perfect solution and I'd also be okay with keeping things as they are today (ignoring `$@` for IPython and using IPYTHON_OPTS), and only doing the doc change. With this change though, when IPython fixes https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/5226, people will immediately be able to do `IPYTHON=1 bin/pyspark myscript.py` to run a standalone script and get all the benefits of running scripts in IPython (presumably better debugging and such). Without it, there will be no way to run scripts in IPython.

@joshrosen you should probably take the final call on this.