dialogs completely gray after being shown and hidden once

[Elaine Meng]

Observed by multiple people on (Mac only?) laptops at the SLAC workshop 7/10/2019, and reproduced by me today (7/11) with current daily build on desktop Mac.

For example, start ChimeraX, open something, menu: UCSF ChimeraX... Preferences, close with red dot in upper left corner. Choose same menu item again to re-show Preferences. Dialog is completely gray.

[Tom Goddard]

Showing the preferences panel a second time it always appears blank for me in ChimeraX daily July 11, 2019. This ChimeraX reports QtCore.QT_VERSION_STR = 5.12.4.

My development build does not have this problem, Preferences always displays correctly, and has QtCore.QT_VERSION_STR = 5.12.3.

So the problem may have been introduced in Qt in going from 5.12.3 to 5.12.4.

[Tom Goddard]

The June 6, 2019 daily build also does not have this bug and reports Qt version 5.12.3.

[Tom Goddard]

The June 18, 2019 daily build has the problem with blank preferences panel and reports Qt version 5.12.3 (not 5.12.4). I vaguely recall Greg Couch saying PyQt5 does not necessarily report the actual version of Qt -- it reports the Qt version PyQt was compiled against, but our ChimeraX may include a different version of Qt. I'm not sure how we determine the actual Qt version being used.

[Tom Goddard]

The prereqs/PyQt/Makefile git change log says we switched frolm Qt5.12.3 to 5.12.4 on June 17, 2019. So the broken June 18 daily build should be using Qt 5.12.4 even though it reports Qt 5.12.3.

[pett]

As per #2201, you can actually click around on the blank window and interact with invisible interface elements! So on the Preferences panel, blindly clicking on the places where the tabs should be, will show the contents of the corresponding tab (but not the tab itself -- except for part of its highlighting!).

[Elaine Meng]

Eric's comment reminded me of the maybe related problem where in-tool menus (Segger tools) become totally transparent, but wherever you mouse over it, the menu text reappears. I thought I made a ticket for that with a screenshot but for the life of me can't find it... maybe I reported it as a Chimera ticket instead of ChimeraX by mistake??

[pett]

It's #2171

[pett]

Okay, it is definitely a problem in 5.12.4. It is this Qt bug: ​https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-76509 There is an ugly workaround in the ticket, that would have to be put into every dialog/window that this bug affects. So far we are aware that it affects the preferences dialog, the file-save dialog, and the in-window menus of the Segger tool. It would seem easier to roll back to 5.12.3 and wait for 5.12.5 (currently scheduled for late August).

--Eric

[Tom Goddard]

Greg backed Qt 5.12.4 to Qt 5.12.3 (and also PyQt 5.12.3 down to PyQt 5.12.2 since we have wheels for PyQt 5.12.2 with Qt 5.12.3 already built).

[Elaine Meng]

This appears to be fixed, along with the transparent-menu problem #2171. I'm comparing today's daily build (7/13) with the 7/11 build that exhibits both problems. Desktop Mac running OS 10.13.6.

[Greg Couch]

Fixed by reverting to earlier Qt.