ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Zach, Eric, Tom

Greg on vacation

June 27, 2022

Agenda

General

ChimeraX

Release Planning

1) Greg wants a 1.4.1 release

2) 1.5 roadmap

Bugs

1) Due asynchronous startup toolshed check, can't issue "toolshed" commands immediately after ChimeraX installation.

Build System

1) Supporting IDEs

• may only need editable installs (will require workaround as namespace packages cannot be installed in this mode automatically)
• editable installs should also let us call ChimeraX with Python for rapid iteration and the C launcher for detailed crash info
• Zach mentioned PyCharm, LSP (Language Server Protocol), XCode
• Greg mentioned Visual Studio

2) API for getting C headers: get_include (see: numpy.get_include)

• native-packaging moves bundle header and source files to bundle/src/include/module \
• maybe just use header files?

3) API for getting library directories: get_libdir

4) macOS compiler call in Makefiles

Infrastructure

1) Beta releases on Toolshed

2) Decoupling core bundle version number from the ChimeraX release number

3) Prereq audit after 27 June

4) arm64 port

• Tom suggests zipping x86_64 ChimeraX and arm64 ChimeraX together
• How best to backport M1 support from native-packaging to 1.4 release branch

5) Regular packages on the toolshed

• Tom wonders if the functionality of python-gdcm is worth its weight
• Zach thinks we should leverage our plugin architecture to let users install only the bundles they need

Chimera

1) Back up the build machine to a solid state drive

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Discussion

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Action Items

• Present github continuous integration tutorial. Zach
• Remove pkg-config prereq if it is not being used for builds. Tom