ECCE 8.18.6

Bug fixes, backported from 9.0.

• File dialog: the Files-of-type choice now filters the file list; before, every filter listed only ... The path has its own row. A typed name is resolved against the listed directory, so absolute paths, relative paths, ~/ and URLs open the file named. The dialog no longer stores or restores the list's * placeholder as a directory, which produced paths such as *//home/....
• Builder, Import Chemical System: a path that cannot be read is reported as "Cannot read " instead of crashing the Builder. This was the crash on importing glycine.pdb and benzene.xyz, caused by the garbled path the file dialog passed. The same unchecked read is fixed in Open for CAR, MVM, PDB, XYZ and trajectory files.
• CAR files without periodic boundaries keep their first atom (benzene.car loaded 11 of 12 atoms); blank and short lines are skipped. PDB residues are assigned without reading an uninitialised pointer.
• Builder started from Organizer > New Structure no longer logs "There was an error parsing or it does not exist."
• Save As no longer prints a Gtk-CRITICAL assertion when it opens.
• Register Machines: form fields are percent-encoded and processmachine runs without a shell, for saving, deleting and the first-start registration of the local machine; a quote, $( ) or backtick in a field is stored as text. processmachine removes and changes permissions on files without a shell, removes machines whose names contain regular-expression characters, and refuses values it cannot store (line breaks, tabs, / in a name, invalid queue names). Files in ~/.ECCE are left writable by their owner.

Packages, each built on the system it is for:

File	Built on	Install with
ecce_8.18.6_amd64.deb	Debian 13.7 (trixie)	sudo apt install ./ecce_8.18.6_amd64.deb
ecce_8.18.6_ubuntu24.04_amd64.deb	Ubuntu 24.04	sudo apt install ./ecce_8.18.6_ubuntu24.04_amd64.deb
ecce-8.18.6-1.x86_64.rpm	Rocky Linux 9.3	sudo dnf install epel-release && sudo dnf install ./ecce-8.18.6-1.x86_64.rpm

Debian 13 tested: the Debian package is the one we test; the teaching calculation set passes on this release, under both transports. The Ubuntu and RPM packages were built on their systems but not tested for this release. RHEL has no ActiveMQ package; see GETTING_STARTED: ActiveMQ on RHEL, Rocky and Fedora.