#10694 highlighted some issues with the document-wide history tracking relating to outputs, but in the discussion it also came up that it might be a good idea to allow to disable this feature entirely.@mlucool noted that this behavior is detrimental to the workflow of some users (#10694 (comment)).

During the weekly call (jupyterlab/frontends-team-compass#128 (comment))@williamstein provided very useful feedback:

1. (against) teachers may want to have full history tracking available
2. (in favour) users sometimes mistakenly paste secretes into notebooks

The first issue does not apply to online sessions where a concern of some disruption to the lesson/vandalism could be a considerations sinceI think we would only want to allow to disable the tracking when not in RTC mode. Still there are some settings (exams?) where instructors may want to keep the history tamper-proof, should an ability to view it be introduced in the future.

The second issue could indeed be a substantial problem once#10544 gets implemented.

I would add another point related to (1):

3. There are regulatory settings (e.g. statistical analysis of clinical trials, see 21 CFR Part 11) where an audit trial record is required; some statistical analysis software products implement it by setting a flag on startup which persists through the session, this is the history tracking cannot be disabled without restarting the application (which clears the history/restarts the signature keys making it tamper-proof on the sufficient level to comply with the regulations).

Given the points (1) and (3) I think we can allow to opt-out of the document-wide history tracking, and it would make sense to require a server restart (so the setting should be implemented on server level).