ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Greg, Zach, Tom, Eric

July 28, 2025

Agenda

• New parser discussion
• Core library distribution
• Updating prereqs.
• Switch from PyQt to PySide?
• 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

• Nightly builds failed due to plato Qt file permissions.
  • Greg has fixed Qt 6.9 file permissions on plato so nightly builds should start working again.

• New atomspec parser
  • Eric got new C++ atomspec parser all working, but it is no faster (0.3% faster) then Grako.
  • Turned out all the time was spent in Python finding the atoms/bonds/residues and that code did not change.
  • Eric proposes merging the new parser branch into develop in case we need to get rid of Grako in the future, but not using it for now.
  • The new parser uses C++17 and our current ChimeraX compilers don't meet that standard. If we need to update compilers, better to just turn off build of new parser.

• Distributing chutil.a static library on Mac for ISOLDE
  • Tristan does not have chutil.a from chimerax core that he needs to compile clipper on Mac.
  • We have not distributed that in the Mac universal build because the make_univeral.py script does not know how to merge ARM and Intel static libraries.
  • Let's ask Tristan how he built clipper for ChimeraX 1.9 since it has the same issue.
  • Discussed that atomic library links to chutil and may expose symbols for chutil.
  • Discussed making chutil a dynamic library. That would raise problems with finding it during runtime linking.

• Switch from PyQt to PySide
  • We will get nightly builds working with Qt 6.9.1 this week before trying to switch to Qt 6.9.1.
  • Tom suggests making tech preview of PySide instead of daily build so we can test without getting a lot of bug reports from users.

• ViewDockX
  • Eric gave new ViewDockX to John Irwin lab.
  • Andrii Kyrylchuk send detailed feedback.
  • Wants to change order of table columns. Eric says Qt tables support that but he will need to add session saving code to remember the column order.

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Action Items