ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Eric, Zach, Tom, Greg

October 3, 2022

Agenda

• ChimeraX 1.5 feature freeze, branch and release candidates today?
• Started Mac ARM and universal daily builds
• Toolshed bundle requirement checking
• Remilestone or close 1.5 roadmap tickets
• Mac universals builds and M1 port
• Discuss possible OpenMM and VR improvements for Tristan and Altos to pursue
• Arrow graphic for Mac dmg file
• Back up the Chimera build machine to a solid state drive, Windows 7?

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Discussion

• Linux compilers
  • Greg will move singularity definition files for ChimeraX linux builds into ChimeraX git repository.
  • This will help Tristan compiling.

• ChimeraX 1.5 branch and release candidates
  • Greg would like to make some bug fixes before we branch.
  • We hope to branch next Monday after discussing at developer meeting.
  • Release candidates can be made a day or two after the branch to make sure nothing committed the day of the branch (which will also be in the daily build) causes serious issues.

• Will we drop macOS 10.14 in ChimeraX 1.5?
  • Plan is to keep macOS 10.14 for ChimeraX 1.5
  • About 100 unique IP addresses per month download from macOS 10.14.
  • Currently Mac universal 10.15, Mac ARM 11, and Mac Intel 10.14 daily builds are made and on the download page in that order.
  • We could use the same for the 1.5 release, including 10.14 on Intel.
  • We could optionally improve the download page to show only the Mac universal build or if the browser user-agent says Mac 10.14 show only the Intel Mac build. The other builds would be under "other releases".
  • Download page improvement can be done any time before or after release.

• Toolshed bundle requirement checking
  • Eric says this is about having the Toolshed verify more than the core version number before installing a bundle.
  • This will be long discussion for another meeting.

• Update UniRef BLAST databases
  • Elaine would like the databases updated for ChimeraX 1.5
  • These are entirely handled by the back-end blast web service so in theory can be updated any time, not coordinated with release.
  • Ticket is assigned to Scooter.
  • Greg found 2021 versions of databases on Wynton that could be used. But require making the blast database files.
  • Scooter indicated by email that milestone for 1.6 is more practical given his limited time.

• Mingw compiler on Windows
  • Zach has tried using the mingw compiler on Windows instead of our current Microsoft Visual Studio.
  • This compiler was easier to use with github actions.
  • Also apparently did not use cygwin.
  • Seems like a major change.

• Have github convert line endings?
  • Zach suggests having git auto-convert text file line endings to use LF and no CR LF in repository.
  • TomG suggests this seems not worth the possible debugging that will result.
  • Zach says it is to help outside developers contributing on Windows to our repository. We don't have any currently.

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Action Items

• Present github continuous integration tutorial. Zach
• Beta releases on Toolshed - make ticket for this. Greg