Avoid fails on async processes in notebooks

[huard]

Description

Some notebooks include async processes, which fail when run by our test suite because the next cells does not wait for the async cell to complete.

Potential solutions

• Add time.sleep() either at the end of the cell, or in another hidden cell (include {"hide_input": true} into the cell) so it does not appear in the rendered HTML.
• Use IPython's await, but this probably requires upstream birdy/owslib modification (ie. use asyncio)

[Zeitsperre]

I know I suggested it on slack, but I'm really not a fan of the time.sleep() approach. It still has the potential to fail (assuming that a process or the network it's run on is too slow) and testing an artificially slowed down notebook is annoying on a performance setup.

Would it be reasonable to open a ticket on owslib and birdy to ask for this functionality? I'm sure @cehbrecht has thoughts on this.

[huard]

I'm not sure exactly what we want. I suggest this is something we defer to the maintenance phase, and we do some initial exploration before proposing anything to owslib.

[tlvu]

I also thought about this, few options, all just hypothesis:

• Add a loop to pool on the ready/done status.
• Add an environment var that during automation run, set the async flag to false. This assume we do not need to test the async feature.