Checklist towards Fixing Cron CI

[jeremyleung521]

Checklist

Cron CI has been broken for more than a year. Here's a checklist for things that need to be done. I did a quick search and wasn't able to find anything related to fixing cron-CI.

Items manually extracted from https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/actions/runs/22748208185

• Release macOS-arm64 builds for distopia https://github.com/conda-forge/distopia-feedstock
• Release macOS-arm64 builds for hole2 https://github.com/conda-forge/hol2-feedstock
• Fix two problematic tests in test_topologyattrs.py
• Release 2.11.0 (to fix filelock test in releases)
• Update macos-13 to macos-15-intel, macos-14 to macos-15 or macos-latest
• (Optional before Oct 2026) drop python 3.10

Details

1/2. First two, should be quite straight forward with the following in conda-forge.yaml, barring any testing/compiling issues (which, if it does raise problems, will take the longest out of all of these points):

build_platform:
  osx_arm64: osx_64
test: native_and_emulated

Existing PRs/Issues, from 2+ years ago. Probably good to try soon because macOS-x64 support will be dropped with macOS 27 (~Oct 2026) and macOS 28 (~Oct 2027):

• @conda-forge-admin, please add osx-arm64 conda-forge/distopia-feedstock#19
• Test osarm conda-forge/hole2-feedstock#3

3. Third one:

FAILED testsuite/MDAnalysisTests/core/test_topologyattrs.py::TestAttr::test_align_principal_axes_with_self - 
TypeError: ufunc 'degrees' not supported for the input types, and the inputs could not be safely coerced to any supported types according to the casting rule ''safe''
FAILED testsuite/MDAnalysisTests/core/test_topologyattrs.py::TestAttr::test_align_principal_axes_with_x - 
TypeError: ufunc 'degrees' not supported for the input types, and the inputs could not be safely coerced to any supported types according to the casting rule ''safe''

4. Release will fix the Issue Test failures in test_xdr.py test_offset_lock_created method #5236 / PR Drop/Replace lock file test in test_xdr #5237 from the conda-forge and PyPI sources.

5. macos-13 has been retired and is no longer offered. Could be swapped to macos-15-intel or macos-26-intel. Similarly, macos-14 can be switched to macos-latest (== macos-15 as of today) or macos-26. macos-26 would be a bigger jump and probably not recommended just yet, considering it hadn't been moved as macos-latest.
   https://github.com/actions/runner-images

6. (Optional) Python 3.10 EOL is Oct 2026. https://devguide.python.org/versions/

[IAlibay]

@jeremyleung521 I think this is one where it's best if I do it. A lot of it is historical CI things that I did back in the day. I'm going to self-assign and hopefully deal with it in a few weeks.

[IAlibay]

Also re: releases, that's not going to happen any time soon unfortuantely - it's a very very time consuming process. We can maybe look to do it in April.

[jeremyleung521]

@jeremyleung521 I think this is one where it's best if I do it. A lot of it is historical CI things that I did back in the day. I'm going to self-assign and hopefully deal with it in a few weeks.

Also re: releases, that's not going to happen any time soon unfortuantely - it's a very very time consuming process. We can maybe look to do it in April.

No worries, I understand how some of them might take a while (and require involvement of certain core maintainers)! I just figured it'll be better to formalize a checklist for what needs to be done in an issue (in hope that it'll help you or someone else!) I'm just generally allergic to ❌ CI marks and want to help a little :P