ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Eric, Zach, Tom, Greg

June 26, 2023

Agenda

• ChimeraX Protein Science paper outline
• Chimera 1.17.2 release (FFmpeg)
• Update ChimeraX prereqs, PyQt 6.5.1, Python 3.11
• ChimeraX 1.7 roadmap
• Release initial ChimeraX library on PyPi or Conda
• Chimera/ChimeraX notarization scripts need updating, Apple deprecated altool command Fall 2023 ​#7234
• ChimeraX Ideas milestone clean-up.
• Install Splunk on plato to monitor web services.
• Back up the Chimera build machine to a solid state drive, Windows 7?
• Toolshed bundle requirement checking
• Discuss possible OpenMM and VR improvements for Tristan and Altos to pursue

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Discussion

• mmCIF out of memory crashes
  • Greg fixed a template memory leak.
  • Eric suspects that may not be the leak that we see reported every day. This leak has been in readcif for years. Also crash is only on Windows and the fixed leak effects all platforms.
  • Will see if we get crash reports for daily build.
  • Greg says ChimeraX can open every mmCIF file from PDB in about 1 day without crashing now.

• Python shell frozen module warning
  • Eric update ChimeraX Shell pypi packages.
  • Shell started warning about no break points for frozen modules which Python 3.11 uses by default.
  • Zach added environment variable to suppress this warning.
  • Discussed making --debug option disable frozen modules. Not needed now.

• Dual display Mac crash
  • Crash being reported every day in ChimeraX 1.6, only Mac, usually with 2 displays.
  • Logs message saying display factor 0.000 and some QPainter problem.
  • Appears this problem was introduced in Qt 6.4.
  • We can update to PyQt 6.5.1 and see if that fixes it.

• Mac notarization
  • Apple says altool will no longer work for notarization Nov 1, 2023.
  • Tom will try to port to the new notarytool shell program.
  • notarytool is reported to need macOS 10.15.
  • Our Intel Mac build machine uses 10.14. May need to update. But worried that Chimera builds may not work if updated.
  • First step will be to fix ChimeraX notarization, maybe on ARM where macOS version is new enough.

• Chimera 1.17.2 release
  • Greg is making this release because ffmpeg was missing from 1.17.1.
  • Needs small fix to python 2 build script to work with python 3.

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Action Items

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