DIALS core meeting 2025-10-09
Previous Actions
- ND Investigate getting
psanatests running on the DIALS xfel-regression testing - ND: Move dials.diamond.ac.uk to a redirect to dials.github.io
Agenda
DIALS Metrics on github.io
- Can play with the power BI page
- Similar page for deposition incoming, by year / institute etc. - working out now how to integrate with the RST for dials.github.io pages.
- Discussed https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/3000
- With better title/extra newsfragment removed, not reason not to merge
- ND to look at Jenkins job
- Consider github action to generate this
cctbx.github.io
- https://github.com/cctbx/cctbx.github.io
- was built by jenkins job
- been failing for ~1year with intersphinx errors
- is this a thing that cctbx still cares about/builds elsewhere?
- ND: Make issue and tag Aaron
- https://github.com/cctbx/cctbx.github.io/issues/1
- Aaron: Billy going to rebuild
- ND: Remove jenkins job that was broken anyway
DIALS Office Hours
- 3pm Thursdays was what we talked about
- ND talk to JBE about running
- Make informal promise for office hours, and a slack channel that people can make known that they have a request to chat/for help about a particular topic
- JBE booked room, not sent out invites/ zoom yet - try to get done in next week.
- Consider sending reminder to slack day before advertising
- James to follow up with advert to non-Diamond people as it is happening already at DLS
- Graeme suggested “themes” for the office hours
- James to follow up
Metrics
- 2025-09-25 - dxtbx-side merged in, nothing yet in DIALS side to push it into the mtz history https://github.com/cctbx/dxtbx/pull/816
- Needs to be work to put in on DIALS side
- Work to do:
- Need to package history into MTZ, but MTZ history not the right place. Decided MTZ-appendix is the right place to put this in, but work not started yet
- Aaron has offered Yang’s skills as his work should cover this area
- Write integrate and scale history to MTZ #2924
- David to dig relevant information out
iota and Prime
- Both developers moved on
- Iota: trouble configuring on recent python versions
- DIALS pulls from conda-forge directly
- This would be a solution for XFEL
- Prime easier to drop but defer decision
- Aaron to ask Mona what she wants to do with Prime (still on to-do)
Additional dependencies
reciprocalspaceshiphas been requested as a dependency in PR 3016- Python-only tool which has potential to replace some
iotbxfunctionality - RSS functionality could be rewritten, does apparently provide useful stuff that could be leveraged later
- Python-only tool which has potential to replace some
- general agreement
AOAOB
- Hamburg: imageset, sequences, laziness so it works on 100,000 image HDF5 files
- Did some work in a branch to get stills_process to use imagesequences
- Nick did some work to eliminate need for check_format
- All of this is in branches that have not been revisited
- Discussion about still goniometer dogma
ImageSequence vs ImageSet
- Marko is working on an NXmx-like format class for SerialED, where the beam position changes each image
- It seems not possible to use
ImageSequencefor this, as it does not allow different models per image. Is this correct? ImageSetworks, but import and viewing images is much slower- Is there a long term plan to converge to just one of these classes, with all performance and feature issues fixed?
- Suggestion to look at DMcD properties table
- Discussion about serialization/deserialization overhead, brief discussion of using another form e.g. hdf5 or sqlite (for Experiment Lists).
- Discussion of existing uses of mixin inheritance
Dials data download failures
- CI failing due to data downloads
- Does dials-data retry?
- ND has recollection that DGW was looking at this?
- Possibly more agressive retention of caches?
- Moved DGW to admin to allow to bypass failures due to incorrect download
- Possibly: Need to check status code on file download?
- Discussion: Worth hosting on LBL?
AOB
Neutrons
- AB had email from Aaron Finke to ask about analysis - when a stable DIALS release that supports neutrons
- DMcD working on last merges
- Both TOF and Laue being worked on
- Move this to top of next agenda so can discuss with DMcD available
- AB has task to set up meeting next week, will try to involve interested parties (e.g. David’s)
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Next meeting
Thursday, October 23rd, 4pm (BST), 8am (PDT), 10am (CDT)