Why hv.output(backend='bokeh') cannot be used before hv.extension?

HoloViews
1

Hi! When working in JupyterLab, I would like to configure my global environment with just one call (after all imports):

hv.output(backend='bokeh', size=200)

However, this leads to the following error: https://pastebin.com/V3HbiL3W
So I have to do the following:

hv.extension('bokeh')
hv.output(size=200)

This is non-intuitive, why this backend keyword argument exists then? Probably, 'backend" and “extension” are different things and I don’t understand how they relate to each other.

HoloViews version: 1.12.7

2

In order for anything to display in the notebook all the relevant libraries have to be loaded. This is done by calling the hv.extension with all the backends that have to be loaded. Without doing so the browser will not be able to render the plots. That being said I do think we should raise a more informative error.