ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Zach, Eric, Tom, Greg, Tom Ferrin

May 4, 2026

Agenda

• Release candidates start today (May 4)?
  • Animation gui ready for release? Zach has two animation demos.
  • glClear error on status line expose event, macOS 26, Qt 6.10. Ticket #20267
  • OpenGL swap_buffers crash on Mac expose event, macOS 26, Qt 6.10. Ticket #20265
  • DLL load failed: An Application Control policy has blocked this file #20228.
• Inside ribbon color?
• Toolshed reduce query result size.
• ​Residue notes in mmCIF, Oliver Clarke
• Chimera not working with macOS 26, graphics pane positioned over command-line.
• Work in progress reports
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• Mac Qt OpenGL errors
  • Tom put work-around in that ignores status line expose events to try to prevent the crashes and tracebacks.
  • Asked a user who is able to reproduce the glClear tracebacks to try it.

• Animation GUI demos
  • Zach showed about 5 sessions with saved animation timelines demonstrating various animation capabilities.
  • Demos included Tom's SLAC animation tutorial which has morphs, spins, atom labels, and volumes.
  • Everyone agreed it seems functional enough to include in release.
  • Zach will update Elaine on the Animation capabilities, what transitions are supported, which are not.

• DLL load errors
  • Greg added ChimeraX bug report output to include Windows patch level to help see if bug reports are coming from not-fully-updated Windows.
  • Greg may look into sighing individual binaries.
  • Errors may resolve themselves when updated virus definitions are released.

• Release candidates
  • We will start release candidate builds.
  • Zach will make branch and builds.
  • Release is planned for first half of June.

• Chimera end-of-life
  • Discussed changes to Chimera to make before last release.
  • Remove annual registration.
  • Remove bug reporting.
  • May want to support PDB long ids.

• CoreHPC free for student classes
  • Klim Verba talked to Tom Goddard about meeting with head of CoreHPC to argue for allowing free use for students taking classes.
  • Klim wants to have meeting first half of May.

• CoreHPC and Wynton basic sciences committee
  • Tom Ferrin described new committee of about a dozen faculty (Brian Shoichet, Andrei Sali, Dave Agard, Tom Ferrin, Tanja Kortemme, Tony Capra...) who will represent basic science departments in School of Pharmacy and Medicine for matters involving compute clusters.
  • First meeting is tomorrow at 4 pm.

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Action Items