Re: [BUG] shell sessions started outside of Babel broken

[Jack Kamm]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

> Org babel assumes ... session is properly initialized if that buffer
> exists.

Forgive me for opining a moment -- but I think it's worthwhile for Org
Babel to support external sessions where feasible.

ob-R and ob-python have long supported this, though recent changes to
ob-python seem to have broken it there (I'm looking into fixing that).

Having the extra flexibility to start the session manually can be
handy. For example, conda is currently broken with ob-shell sessions (as
discussed in this thread), but not M-x shell sessions, so it provides a
useful workaround.

For ob-python, in the past I found that manually invoking "M-x
run-python" was convenient for starting different types of python
sessions, such as with IPython, or with conda environments.

That being said, I do appreciate that supporting this use case adds
extra headaches for maintenance, and is difficult to test. In the end, I
think it should be up to the individual Babel maintainer whether they
want to support it for their language.