ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Zach, Greg, Tom, Eric

December 1, 2025

Agenda

• need newer ffmpeg for RHEL 10, what about others?
• Does animations bundle need custom init?
• Release candidate issues
• 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
• 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

• ChimeraX mailing list moderation
  • We will change to moderating all first posts of new users.
  • Will change all the mailing lists (chimerax, chimera, chimera-dev).
  • AI bots continue to post spam (casinos, real estate) on the mailing list.
  • Eric blocked gmail.com registration temporarily over the holiday to stop it.
  • Eric suggests switching to moderate all users, then switch them to unmoderated after first legitimate post.
  • Would be nice to exempt all current mailing list users, but we are not sure if that is easy to do. Possibly bulk setting changes in admin interface can do it.

• ffmpeg on Rocky 10
  • Greg says Rocky 10 ChimeraX build failing when compiling old ffmpeg.
  • Greg will look for binary distribution of ffmpeg to include with Rocky 10.

• Windows installer signing
  • Tested ChimeraX release candidate and daily build install on Windows 10 during today's meeting and it no longer says "Don't run".
  • So our reputation has apparently been upgraded to remove the warnings.

• Animation tool custom init
  • Eric suggests removing animation tool custom init which defined the session.animations attribute as a manager.
  • The custom init caused animations to be saved in every session even when not used.
  • Decide that should be changed to use a function (e.g. animations_manager(session)) to get the manager or create it if it does not yet exist.
  • Zach will make that change.

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Action Items