= 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 =