ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Piet, Greg, Tom, Eric, Zach

December 16, 2024

Agenda

• Nightly cx_developers email: No module named 'django'
• 1.9 release planned for December 9, 2024
• Should developer tutorial section on commands talk more about keywords
• GitHub Actions builds
• Clean-up ChimeraX 1.9 roadmap wiki page
• Work in progress reports
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.
• Back up the Chimera build machine to a solid state drive, Windows 7.

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Discussion

• ChimeraX 1.9 bugs
  • Eric reports a few 1.9 bug reports that may or may not be serious.
  • Some 1.8 sessions involving sequences don't restore in 1.9.
  • KVFinder crashes ChimeraX on Windows for some structures.

• Crash reporting on Windows
  • Greg says Windows ChimeraX does not start with Python -X faulthandler command-line option.
  • That may be why Eric did not get asked to report crash in KVFinder test.
  • Need to investigate if all crash reports on Windows are disabled.

• Home directories on NAS
  • Greg moved Chimera, cxtoolshed, Elaine, TomF plato home directories from beegfs to NAS.

• cx_developers script error "django not found"
  • Possibly caused by moving cxtoolshed home directory to NAS.
  • Greg sees hard-coded /wynton paths in the python venv activate script called before running script.

• Cannot remove directories on plato
  • Eric was unable to remove nobackup/essex directories in his home directory on plato even though he has ownership and permissions (he rsynced them there).
  • Greg says sometimes beegfs metadata server corruption after disk problems could cause this.

• ChimeraX developer tutorial: keywords
  • ChimeraX outside developers often use no keyword arguments, only postional ones in commands.
  • Tutorial example does not show keyword option.
  • Eric will look into adding a keyword example.
  • Eric might add a section extolling virtues of keyword options over optional options.

• Volume attributes for scenes
  • Piet asked about what attributes of volumes are important for scenes.
  • Tom described styles, thresholds, colors.
  • Greg suggests Piet document API to add a new model type to scenes and Tom add volumes.

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Action Items