November 6, 2008

Attendees: tef, Scooter, Elaine, Greg, Eric, Conrad

New Action Items

• Greg will write a script to remove cruft from web download tree (item 1)
• Scooter will look into trac response time and email content (item 1)
• Scooter will send out the current library course schedule and everyone will respond with updates and/or splitting into multiple sessions (item 1)
• Conrad will forward Scooter's news item text to group (item 1)
• Conrad will check if there is a new mmCIF dictionary (item 1.5)

Previous Action Items

• Conrad, Eric, Greg and Scooter have tasks for Chimera production release and conversion to svn/trac
  • build and announce release candidate
  • convert from cvs to svn
  • convert from gnats to trac
  • create account for Wei to access svn/trac
• Conrad will look into disabling stereo in orthographic view
• Al will decommission SGI after the next Chimera production release
• Al will install stereo-capable workstation to replace SGI before decommissioning SGIs
• tef will contact Adobe for more information about embedding 3d graphics in PDF documents

Minutes

1. Previous Action Items
   • Greg volunteered to write cruft-removal script from web download tree since he has been working on the build process and is familiar with where files are copied.
   • Scooter will look into trac response time (reported by Tom in previous week) as well as adding a URL to trac e-mail (requested by Eric in previous week).
   • Elaine reported that SSD does not need MinrmsPlot. The SSD distribution does not work with the latest production release, apparently because one of the files contains a non-ASCII symbol. Python 2.5 is more strict with character encoding and rejects the file. Scooter will look into fixing the problem.
   • Scooter has reserved the room for the Spring term library course. The session descriptions need to be updates and at least one session (Images/Movies) need to be split. Scooter will send out the current descriptions and everyone should respond with either updates or "No change".
   • Scooter has written a news item announcing release 1.3 and sent it to Conrad. Conrad will forward the text to the group.
   • Greg said that daily and candidate builds are working. Greg will make candidate builds be made automatically daily at Conrad's suggestion. tef asked what is the point of a constantly changing candidate. Response was that if no changes were made, then the builds from the two days would be the same.

1.5 Release 1.3 status

• The Aqua release will be promoted to a production release. Elaine was concerned with (a) the very white/blinding background, and (b) MultAlignViewer not working well with the white background. Greg mentioned that (a) is exactly the Aqua coloring scheme. Scooter commented that (b) is not sufficient reason to prevent the promotion to production status. Both Greg and Scooter suggested that we make the production release and address the problem if there are bug reports. The fix can go out in a minor 1.3.1 release in a timely manner.
• Conrad will check if there is a new mmCIF dictionary that should be shipped with 1.3

2. 64-bit platform support (Eric)
   • 64-bit support is needed for large volume data sets and large trajectories (>2GB) in GROMACS format. 64-bit support for Windows will only be possible when we move to Python 2.6 and Visual Studio 2008. Mac 64-bit support is possible in OSX 10.5 but not 10.4. Since we support the two newest OSX releases, a good time to add 64-bit support for Macs is after the 10.6 (snow leopard) release, because we would then still have only one Mac distribution (32-bit version will no longer be needed).

3. Add plotting package (matplotlib/BLT) to Chimera (Eric)
   • Randy Heiland, author of NLOPredict extension for Chimera, requested that a plotting library be included with the distribution. The problem arose when we switched to Python 2.5 with Tcl/Tk 8.5. NLOPredict is distributed with matplotlib as its plotting package. Unfortunately, there is only a binary release of matplotlib for Python 2.5 with Tk 8.4, which makes building NLOPredict problematic. Eric proposed Pmw/BLT as an alternative. David Beck from Washington University vehemently opposed this, saying that BLT is not sufficient. Eric, Tom and Conrad have all independently looked at Python plotting packages. matplotlib appears to be the best, but is also _very_ large, suggesting that maintenance and porting may be an issue. Conrad mentioned that Tom may have experimented with matplotlib. Item was tabled until we can get Tom's input.

4. Evaluation of features to remove or improve (All)
   • The results of feature evaluation are:
     • Keep:
       • PseudoBond Reader, Demo Editor/Demos
     • Improve:
       • Nucleotides, Chimera/Mesa (headless), Raytracing, VRML, Movie Recorder
     • Remove:
       • Auto-generated Programmer's Guide, Surfnet - Interface/Selected Atoms, Model Loops, Resolution: high/low in SideView dialog, DelphiController, FreeBSD port, MinrmsPlot (only from menu), Selector Construction Panel, Keyboard Shortcuts
     • Final Decision Pending:
       • Lenses/Lens Inspector, ResProt (just the coloring part), Phantom Force Feedback, Volume Series, Fourier Transform, Named Volume Subregions, Precomputed Volume Subsamples
     • Commands to be removed from documentation but not from code:
       • x3dsave, ribcolor, source, load
   • Final decision should be made very soon so that announcement can go out with 1.3 release.