ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Zach, Greg, Tom, Eric

December 15, 2025

Agenda

• Release today?
• Qt updates to fix Mac crashes in Qt 6.9.2.
  • Crash in swap_buffers #19178
  • Crash in NSAccessibility #19187
  • OpenGL error after wake from sleep #19185
  • Crash in NSAutoreleasePool #19180
  • Tabbed tools don't show tabs often #19078
• Chimera not working with macOS 26, graphics pane positioned over command-line.
• Work in progress reports
• Inside ribbon color?
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• ChimeraX 1.11 release
  • Zach will make the ChimeraX 1.11 release today.

• Updates for ChimeraX 1.12
  • We will update to PyQt 6.10.1 after holidays.
  • Will need to discuss updating numpy 1 to 2, Python 3.11 to 3.x, replacing PyQt with PySide. These need to be started early in the 6 month release cycle since they are big changes.

• Handling python dependency mismatches
  • Company user tried to update certifi using pip install in ChimeraX. That puts it in user area and the distributed version is earlier in search path.
  • Could try making ChimeraX python user area earlier in search path than distributed site-packages. But that may cause ChimeraX to fail.
  • Discussed basic Python issue that many packages pin version numbers of dependencies so that will easily cause version mismatches. And Python does not refuse to install new version when other packages require old version.
  • If company licensed users need security updates we should probably handle that on a case-by-case basis.

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Action Items