ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Zach, Tom, Eric

June 2, 2025

Agenda

• ChimeraX 1.10 release in June 2025
• Should we disable Windows crash reports since they are almost always useless?
• ChimeraX asking for registration more than once #17080
• 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 release
  • Tom suggests release early next week. Tom posted Boltz tool to X/Twitter last week to get more testing and want to wait a week to see if bugs come in.
  • Still have 18 active tickets for 1.10. About 15 assigned to Greg. Greg is on vacation.
  • Need to fix bug where request to register is happening every year.
  • Will discuss release schedule on Thursday with Greg and need to remilestone, fix or close 1.10 tickets.

• Allow Windows and Linux crash reports?
  • We almost never get any useful info from Windows and Linux crash reports.
  • Windows crash reporting has been disabled in ChimeraX for several years. But we reenabled it after 1.9 in the daily builds to see if the faulthandler traceback info has improved.
  • Eric and Tom agree we should disable crash reports on Windows and Linux in 1.10.
  • In daily build we will keep Windows crash reports enabled so Eric can test a possible fix to a common Windows open dialog crash of turning of garbage collection while open dialog shown.
  • In daily build we will allow Linux crash reporting but only if user provides email address.

• New ViewDock test and release plan
  • Piet is finishing his ViewDock work but it still needs testing and release.
  • Eric says it is tricky to test because old ViewDockX needs to be removed to properly test the new ViewDock since it registers for the same file types.
  • Elaine and John Irwin should do initial testing using daily build, and Eric will make needed fixes.

• ChimeraX build system problems
  • Error in tests because it can't find Python.h. Zach says he is aware of it and will fix it. Eric can ignore it for now.
  • Mac hdutil says it can't release image. Zach will look into it. Seems like a parallel processing problem where one process is using the image when another tries to eject it. Might put a sleep 5 in before eject, or might try to re-eject on failure.

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Action Items