ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance: Greg, Zach, Tom, Eric

August 10, 2026

Agenda

• Next group meeting date and speaker
• Nightly builds macOS reproducible garbage collection crash in test suite.
• ChimeraX benchmark time series web page.
• Plato flatpak ChimeraX failing
• Try PyQt to PySide for next release?
• Inside ribbon color.
• Work in progress reports.
• Toolshed reduce check for updates result size.
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• Next group meeting date and speaker
  • Next group meeting will be August 20.
  • Decided to skip August 13 at our last meeting, Scooter away.
  • Scooter will speak at August 20 meeting.
  • Eric will announce restart of group meetings.

• Nightly builds macOS reproducible garbage collection crash in test suite.
  • Eric tried to reproduce this garbage collection crash on his Mac Studio. Did not crash.
  • Tom will comment out the specific command test "align #1 to #1" that failed today and see if it crashes in tonight's builds.
  • Seems the crash needs the Github continuous integration environment to happen.

• ChimeraX benchmark time series web page.
  • Zach made a web page of timings of ChimeraX opening and closing structures, cartoon display, and ball style.
  • Used historical 2021-2024 benchmark data.
  • Shows an interesting speed up of 10-50% around the time of ChimeraX 1.7 in 2023.
  • Zach has the nightly builds collecting timings on Mac (chopin) and plato

• Plato flatpak ChimeraX failing
  • Plato (Rocky 8) flatpak ChimeraX updated nightly exits on startup.
  • Greg says flatpak support needs to be installed on all 4 plato nodes, currently only on one node.
  • Greg installed it on 4 nodes during meeting.

• Try PyQt to PySide for next release?
  • Qt 6.11.2 expected out soon.
  • We will test on one of our lab machines to see if Mac main window resize still broken when a floating tool window shown.

• Work in progress reports.
  • Tom working on mutation scores, GUI to associate homolog structures with non-identical sequences.
  • Updating Elaine's mutation documentation.
  • Will try updating ChimeraX OpenFold 3 soon when preview 3 release (currently in private consortium member only testing).
  • Eric working on metal geometry tools.
  • Eric has MD RMSD tool done but still working on user guide documentation.

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Action Items