ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Zach, Greg, Tom, Eric, Piet

May 5, 2025

Agenda

• ChimeraX 1.10 release in June 2025
• Dependabot notifications of PyPi new package versions.
• Should we disable Windows crash reports since they are almost always useless?
• Prevent submitting crash reports if a "This is a known crash..." is given and they provide no email.
• ChimeraX asking for registration more than once #17080
• Chimera webpush often fails in shutil.rmtree() OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'cavities'
• ViewDockX port to Qt
• Inside ribbon color?
• 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.
• Linux ARM64 release and download page

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Discussion

• ChimeraX 1.10 release candidate
  • Decided to make branch and release candidate this week. Zach will do it. He just made the branch.
  • Aim is to make 1.10 release first week in January.
  • Have 29 ticket milestoned for 1.10. Greg and Zach will work on fixing or remilestoning those.
  • Reviewed roadmap. Several items not yet complete will be pushed to 1.11.
  • Definitely want bug where users asked to register more than once fixed in the 1.10 release.

• ViewDock
  • Piet has new ViewDock mostly implemented.
  • Will put in daily builds and get John Irwin to try it.
  • Discussed if old session with ViewDockX data should open using a hidden copy of old ViewDockX or should new ViewDock attempt to handle old ViewDockX sessions. Piet will investigate how hard latter approach is.

• Dependabot
  • Zach will turn off dependabot for pypi so we don't get further pull request notifications.
  • After release we will run dependabot to get latest PyPi versions when we do once per release updates, then close all dependabot pull requests.
  • ChimeraX developer Mitch Murphy had choice works for the 50 dependabot pull requests obscuring his real pull request.

• Crash reporting improvements
  • Eric will test Windows crash reporting after using open/save dialog to try to understand why faulthandler spews so many confusing Python tracebacks.
  • We enabled Windows crash reports just for 1.10 daily builds and may disable them if they still seem of no value.
  • Tom will make reporting known crashes without specifying an email address not actually report the crash to save us time triaging bug reports.

• Web update error deleting directories
  • We still get error deleting old web directories from nightly ChimeraX documentation update script.
  • Greg made this give a warning instead of fail with an error.
  • Greg believes some other process is holding onto some files that cause this problem.
  • Directories are removed the next day and that seems to never fail.
  • Decided to remove warning so we don't get email about this non-problem.

• Inside ribbon color
  • Eric wants to prioritize adding inside ribbon color support. Only applies to helices. (What about nucleotides?)
  • Need to make ticket.
  • Tom will need to enhance ribbon graphics to handle the coloring and make sharp color boundary for helices.
  • Eric would add per-residue inside ribbon color and session saving support.

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Action Items