Jupyterlab: Build Quality of Life Improvements

[blink1073]

• We need to add the following to webpack.config.js: optimization: minimizer: [new UglifyJsPlugin({ cache: process.platform !== "win32" })], to help avoid the path length restriction on Windows. I ran into this today on a machine where I don't have admin access to make a change to the registry.

  I was getting paths like the following: node_modules\\\\.cache\\\\uglifyjs-webpack-plugin\\\\content-v2\\\\sha512\\\\f0\\\\d9\\\\41b44207c2fa7189a30f3b6aeb8e22585bd4b0a78f8de3894c218f5b16de8ff9e48f3e54f767f6f69f99b6ba0a41538dd5b163d436d72ceb0ba4f3d4fbd

• We should also consider making dev_build the default option for jupyter lab build (and labextension install), and only uglify when explicitly asked, to avoid taking up large amounts of CPU, RAM, and time.

[ian-r-rose]

I agree that a dev build is preferable much of the time (maybe we should only uglify upon publishing the JS bundle to pypi/conda?).

[blink1073]

Yeah, we would definitely do that, and folks that are making a build to distribute would do the same, but for most local users the unminified version should be a fine default.

[saulshanabrook]

We should also consider making dev_build the default option for jupyter lab build (and labextension install), and only uglify when explicitly asked, to avoid taking up large amounts of CPU, RAM, and time.

That makes sense to me. Often build's are just done locally and minifying resources just for local use isn't that necessary.