= ChimeraX Developer Meeting =

Attendance: Greg, Zach, Tom, Eric

June 24, 2024

= Agenda =

* Should we update to Python 3.12 for ChimeraX 1.9?
* Work in progress reports
* 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.
* Regular Chimera release.

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= Discussion =

* ChimeraX 1.8
  - Have seen a few Mac bug reports with no C stack provided by Mac crash reporter.
  - Can tweet 1.8 release as it seems it is working fine.

* Make distclean
  - Greg made "make clean" not remove downloaded third-party packages (from plato archive) so if plato is down we can still build using already downloaded packages.
  - Use "make distclean" to remove downloaded packages.

* ChimeraX dark mode
  - Greg has ChimeraX behaving better in operating system Dark Mode.
  - Uses Qt 6.7 for html panels, Log, file history.
  - Some icons are hard to see (black on transparent background), and new ones could be made.  Greg will add mechanism to use a dark mode icon if one is available.

* Python 3.12 for ChimeraX 1.9?
  - Discussed whether to update ChimeraX to Python 3.12.
  - Python 3.12 released October 2023 and is now at 3.12.4.
  - Greg says Python has 3 years of support where they distribute builds with security fixes.  So 3.11 from October 2022 is supported until October 2025 (3 ChimeraX releases from now).
  - After 3 year support Python still includes security fixes for another 3 years but does not provide builds, so you have to build yourself to get those.
  - Zach will try a Python 3.12 ChimeraX build to see how many third-party packages cause problems (not yet available for 3.12).

* Chimera 1.18 release
  - Chimera fails reading AlphaFold 3 mmCIF files because of a "." in some mandatory field (chain id?).
  - Greg will make 1.18 release, no candidates, just build and release.

* ChimeraX 1.9 roadmap
  - Eric suggests we finally fix long atom spec parsing crashes.
  - Greg interested in making linux flatpack use system python.

* Linux package manager ChimeraX versions
  - Greg would like to have ChimeraX distributed through standard Ubuntu package repository.
  - Would require agreeing to license in a different way, e.g. on ChimeraX startup.
  - Flatpaks also have repository want to update automatically which presents licensing issues.

* Scan web logs for ChimeraX use statistics
  - Greg suggests we try scanning web logs for statistics on active number of ChimeraX users for future grant applications.

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= Action Items =

* Zach remove direct use of pip in Makefile.bundle.  Use something like $(PYTHON) -m pip so the correct Python is used.