Kernel shutdown and restart

[davidbrochart]

It looks like sending a shutdown_request with content:

{
    "restart": true
}

doesn't restart the kernel, although it is specified in the kernel protocol.

[ccordoba12]

I can confirm this is the case.

[davidbrochart]

If the kernel is able to shutdown and restart, the shutdown_reply must have a content of:

{
    "status": "ok",
    "restart": true
}

Then I think that ipykernel should reply with a status of "error", because it couldn't restart, so that the client is aware of it and can start the kernel manually as a fallback. But this is ambiguous because we don't know if the kernel did shutdown.

[davidbrochart]

Or maybe "restart": false in the reply could indicate that the kernel couldn't restart? The documentation is not very clear on this.

[davidbrochart]

I opened https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter_client/issues/736 to clarify the specification about this.