Please bring back LabApp.collaborative setting

[yambottle]

Problem

I'm trying to find a way to enable/disable the jupyter-collaboration extension from a SeverAdmin perspective, but I found the LabApp.collaborative is deprecated and not working:

jupyterlab Version 4.0.5
jupyter_collaboration Version 1.1.0
command to start server: jupyter lab # collaboration extension enabled by default without the --collaborative flag

## To enable real-time collaboration, you must install the extension `jupyter_collaboration`.
#          You can install it using pip for example:
#
#              python -m pip install jupyter_collaboration
#
#          This flag is now deprecated and will be removed in JupyterLab v5.
#  Default: False
# c.LabApp.collaborative = False

Proposed Solution

I guess there is definitely a reason why the team changed it that way, but please consider a case that I’m going to deploy a jupyterhub which serves multiple groups of users using jupyterlab and I wish to have an easy config for me as an ServerAdmin to enable/disable the RTC extension in different jupyterhub profiles, of course at the meantime, also allowing the users to enable/disable the extension by jupyter labextension disable @jupyter/collaboration-extension.
So I’d suggest add an ExtensionApp setting performs just like the deprecated LabApp.collaborative, and set it default as True.

And since this is not available at the current moment, my solution would be maintaining two separated images, one with the extension installed and another one without. But hopefully, this can be changed back to a server setting.

Additional context

More context is in this Topic on the Jupyter Community Forum.

[hbcarlos]

Hi @yambottle.

There is a new flag --YDocExtension.disable_rtc=True. We changed the name because now the flag is in jupyter-collaboration instead of jupyterlab, and the default behavior changed.

[yambottle]

Thanks @hbcarlos !