ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Greg, Tom, Eric

November 27, 2023

Agenda

• NIAID goals
• Release candidate progress.
• Review ChimeraX 1.7 roadmap and tickets.
• Worm ribbon implementation, ticket #9942
• Tristan Toolshed install dependency issues, Ticket #9861, blocking Clipper update #9786
• Tristan, bundle version number not reported correctly. Ticket #9873
• Log slow to update when it gets long, Tristan ticket #9909
• Create Grafana dashboards to monitor web services.
• ViewDockX port to Qt progress
• How long should code commits be added to release branch after release?
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes for 1.18 release in Spring 2024.
• Back up the Chimera build machine to a solid state drive, Windows 7.
• ChimeraX Ideas milestone clean-up.

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Discussion

• Python 3.11 update
  • Greg suggested updating from Python 3.11.2 to 3.11.5 for various bug fixes.
  • Decided we should do that in the daily build once the ChimeraX 1.7 release is out.

• SciPy broken on macOS 11
  • Helix tubes use scipy which fails on macOS 11 with ARM CPU.
  • PyPi scipy requires macos 12
  • ChimeraX 1.5 and 1.6 also used macos 12 scipy, but an earlier 1.9 version while now we use 1.11 scipy.
  • Don't have a macOS 11 system to test on.

• ffmpeg flatpak error
  • Movie encoding fails in ChimeraX 1.7rc flatpak distribution with image files not found message.
  • Greg reproduced this on his flatpak ChimeraX.
  • Flatpak comes with ffmpeg 5.0.3.
  • Not clear if this is a problem with ffmpeg accessing files in /tmp or if the flatpak ffmpeg was compiled without %d file name support.
  • Greg will investigate.
  • Tom tried ffmpeg 5.0.1 static build on Ubuntu and it worked.

• Windows trailing space in directory name
  • Eric fixed Chimera bug where it creates a user-specified directory on Windows with a trailing space.
  • Trailing spaces not supported on Windows for files and directories.

• ChimeraX 1.7 release
  • Eric suggest we may be ready for release in 1 to 2 weeks.

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Action Items