Lab changelog and release notes

Robocorp Lab (4.21.1)

October 4, 2021

Recent Robots listing implementation changed not to show deleted items
Set Global Variable & Set Suite Variable values are now held in cell-by-cell running
Restart kernel -button added to the notebook button panel
- All the kernel commands are still available behind Ctrl+Shift+C > type restart
- Having a button there simplifies working with Python libraries.

Update to RCC v11.1.6
- Reduced use of os.stat as they seem to affect Windows usage
- V11 migration guide at: RCC changelog
Lab kernel environments are now rotated to avoid file lock when changing conda.yaml
- Note: If robot logic opens a process that freezes or does not shut down when Lab asks it to, you can still get file locks.

Having `defaults '-channel in conda.yaml will cause errors; now is the time to get rid of that.
- Parts of the Lab basement are no longer shipped via defaults -channel, causing weird errors.
- Templates and robots in Robocorp Portal have been updated since February, but basically, you only need to remove that one line.
- Simplest conda.yaml example is:

channels:
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - python=3.7.5
  - pip=20.1
  - pip:
      - rpaframework==14.1.1

October 25, 2021

Dynamic Robot template updates
- Added Playwright -template and more coming.
- All templates also now visible in Portal
Updated and curated Keyword Explorer content to match rpaframework v11.4.0
RCC updated to v11.4.3 --> rcc configuration speedtest
- In Lab, use File > Terminal and run rcc configuration speedtest command to test the performance of your system.
- System requirements are notoriously hard to write up as in virtualized environments, we cannot trust just the hardware specs.
- The speed test results are set so that zero is a "good enough" value, positive values are good and negative values indicate slower performance.
- The results are split into operations over network and operations over filesystem
  - These are not just transfer speeds, as in virtualized systems, you can have blazing fast internet, but the CPU actions related to those might slow down the result.
  - Same goes for the filesystem measurement; the specs of the hardware mean nothing if the actual file storing and reading is slow due to some virtualization layer or a heavy virus scanner process.

Update to RCC v11.4.3
- Added retry mechanisms to attempt retries earlier and in smaller chunks.
- Added retries to removal processes as well (Windows file locks)
- Dropped minimum worker count to 2 to ease the load on minimal hardware.
Lab kernel switching now jumps directly to the new one without an extra step to "backup kernel"
Dependency updates for most extensions
In Python the problem with a={"b":"c"} format fixed
Fixes to JupyterLab Tornado timing out, causing stuck states to Restarting or Connecting states.

Having `defaults '-channel in conda.yaml will cause errors; now is the time to get rid of that.
- Parts of the Lab basement are no longer shipped via defaults -channel, causing weird errors.
- Templates and robots in Robocorp Portal have been updated since February, but basically, you only need to remove that one line.
- Simplest conda.yaml example is:

channels:
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - python=3.7.5
  - pip=20.1
  - pip:
      - rpaframework==14.1.1

"Lab is unresponsive" on some machines.
- Use rcc configuration speedtest to determine the cause and ping the result on Slack / Forum.
  - Disk speed seems to be the most common cause for slow environment setups
  - A Windows machine with 2 CPU cores does struggle quite a lot as Windows Defender (or anti-virus scanners in general) pretty much occupy half of the processing power trying to scan the incoming files.
- Lab base dependencies are big, and we are working on getting a significant cut to those (via ipywidgets v8).