ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Greg, Zach, Tom, Eric

November 17, 2025

Agenda

• Start release candidates
• Qt updates to fix Mac crashes in Qt 6.9.2.
  • Crash in swap_buffers #19178
  • Crash in NSAccessibility #19187
  • OpenGL error after wake from sleep #19185
  • Crash in NSAutoreleasePool #19180
  • Tabbed tools don't show tabs often #19078
• ChimeraX 1.11 release schedule
• Chimera not working with macOS 26, graphics pane positioned over command-line.
• Work in progress reports
• Inside ribbon color?
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• Windows installer signing
  • Greg says some chance that signing will work in tonights builds.

• Release candidate
  • Branch not yet made and no release candidates up.

• PyPi ChimeraX library
  • A user asked if ChimeraX PyPi library is available for Windows.
  • Currently only version for Mac and old ChimeraX 1.8.
  • User did not respond to Tom's reply asking if they knew about using --nogui option to run scripts.

• Generic Python C API
  • Greg wants to have ChimeraX use generic Python C API for the 1.12 release.
  • This will help third party extension writers who use compiled code make one binary release that will still work in future ChimeraX versions that use newer Python 3.x.

• TCIA database
  • Eric asks if Zach has responded to developer who described TCIA database reorganization. Not yet.

• Zach priorities
  • Animation GUI
  • Move medical imaging to bundle.
  • MCP AI agent interface

• Mailing list spam
  • Getting spam advertising (gambling, online casinos, real estate) on ChimeraX mailing list possibly by AI bots which are capable of registering a new user, confirming email, then posting.
  • Eric and Greg added some fields to block bots from using ChimeraX mailing list sign-up cgi-bin.

• Tristan
  • Tom will notify Tristan of upcoming release.
  • Tristan says RCSB removing ligand-expo which provides CCD templates for codes containing underscore characters for protonation states is not needed. He includes those files in ISOLDE.

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Action Items