DIALS core meeting 2026-06-18
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
- Caveat: Sub-path links either work or not, do not get redirected
- Now have an idea who owns this, chasing it down
Agenda
Mac Installer
Matt Mcleod notes that the Mac launcher button for 3.28.0 doesn’t work. https://dials.github.io/installation.html. It seems filenames have changed on https://dials.diamond.ac.uk/diamond_builds/
- Proposed solution: Wait until conda-forge has releases and build conda-constructor packages for platforms other than linux
- People seem generally happy with this
News from Phenix
- Now on Python 3.11 so can have more recent version of DIALS
ImageSequence rewrite PR
- Discussion on https://github.com/dials/dials/issues/2377 using ImageSequence in dials.stills_process. Now looking at a scan properties solution. Benchmarking. How long does dials.image_viewer take to open with FormatXTC?
- PR: https://github.com/dials/dials/pull/3181
- General discussion on how to deal with AI generated code changes. Break sweeping Claude changes into small easily reviewed and understood components.
DIALS Repo PR Notes
- DIALS PR list is not showing many PR. (Header shows 25, 15 in list)
- Nick has filed a ticket, somewhat known issue with stale indexing caches
- Ticket addressed while in this meeting!
Other CI Issues
- Installers failing on our internal CI machines. Down to launch logic in https://github.com/dials/dials/blob/e91f5f66368ec546b160ccfd2fbd30b2926a65de/installer/create_installer.py#L36-L52 that prefers python2.7 if available - looks like conda-pack switched to requiring python 3.
- Probably easiest way for now is to just use
python/python3and remove the fallbacks. - 3.29 out, DGW reports some windows issues
- ND to address
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
- MTZ Appendix: Some controversy
- Phenix/DIALS not included in discussions
- Fundamental technological issues
- Mixing MTZ/CIF
- Gemmi supports
- AB met with BP/DGW/Oleg/Dorothy and talking about MTZ appendix issue
- Conclusion: Nobody completely happy, AB to approach Clemens and get conversation going
- Dan Paley found issue with profiling and MTZ appendix https://github.com/cctbx/dxtbx/pull/867
- Agreed looks reasonable
- Requested David to have a look
- All agreed, merge after newsfragment
- Merged!
- AB: To make meeting with Clemens to try to find agreement that we probably need to just go with this
- Have reached out over email
- Probably a good idea to discuss this with everyone in person in Calgary
- DW feels just missing the MTZ appendix output, feels we are going to have to use it eventually
dials.index with max_lattices >= 2: rejection criteria
- https://github.com/dials/dials/issues/3110 dials.index with max_lattices >= 2: rejection criteria.
- We think related to known symmetry
- Wait until Graeme here
- Long discussion about integration memory usage and sample datasets.
- Graeme is here!
- Graeme is going to make efforts to come up with a plan for fixing this
- Interesting discussion about handling of multilattice data
- Graeme is not here today, defer until he is
AOB
Niggli cell rewrite message incompatibility
- Xia2 error: https://github.com/xia2/xia2/issues/925
- https://github.com/cctbx/cctbx_project/pull/1184
We should promote xia2 more
- Reports from workshops that people like autoproc “because it is only one thing to run and not many steps”
- We should promote that xia2 is an option that does this!
Next meeting
Thursday, July 2nd, 4pm (BST), 8am (PDT), 10am (CDT)