ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Tom, Zach, Eric, Greg

June 22, 2026

Agenda

• Release
  • Seems to be fine; one report of Windows DLL failure
• Not compiling Python ourselves; use GitHub
  • Try as a tech preview
  • Still do Linux ourselves because of ssh
• ChimeraX 1.13 updates?
  • Python 3.14 (blocked by #20335 and #16848)
  • PySide 6.11.1
    • Try it again -- in a week (along with other package updates)
• Ubuntu 26.04 builds - when Github Actions supports 26.
  • Available now; deploy into our daily builds
• Inside ribbon color?
• Toolshed reduce query result size.
• Chimera release?
• Work in progress reports
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• CGL email server
  • Discussed steps to migrate Trac and ChimeraX mailing list when UCSF IT takes over cgl.ucsf.edu email domain.

• Improve ChimeraX nightly build emails
  • The nightly build emails often say builds did not reach plato.
  • Eric notes those builds often succeed and the email is sent before the builds complete.
  • Want the email to be deferred until builds complete so we don't waste time looking at whether compilation failed due to new commits.
  • Email should indicate if there were build errors.
  • Zach will look into improving this.

• ChimeraX package updates
  • Discussed updating to Qt 6.11, numpy 2, PySide 6.11, Python 3.14.
  • We will update to Qt 6.11 but wait on switching PyQt to PySide so we can easily track the cause of new bugs.
  • Tom will look at making ChimeraX code compliant with numpy 2.
  • There is no numpy 1 binary distribution for Python 3.14 so we would like to update to numpy 2 before updating Python to 3.14.

• Prebuilt Python
  • Zach plans to make a tech preview to try prebuilt Python binaries from Github Astro site.
  • This will allow us to use the latest Python patches without us having to compile new Python versions.

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Action Items