PyMEL and its legal/official status
Timm Wagener
Hey guys
this is just a quick question concerning the legal and/or official status of PyMEL. As I understand it, Autodesk ships Maya with PyMEL included nowadays, however it is not officialy supported !?
As a Dev. who has been using PyMEL since version 0.8 or so (got my first copies from a Google Code Project repo. if I remember correctly :D …) I quite frankly think that there is no alternative.
However I witnessed (technical) executives and decision makers shy away from allowing PyMEL in their codebase on numerous occasions now, for the lack of real (!?) officiality.
How is the general situation concerning the officiality of PyMEL? Is the current situation a veritable liability risk for decision makers?
Technical Director Pipeline & Lighting/Shading
www.timmwagener.com | wagen...@gmail.com | Phone: 0160-99298540
Geordie Martinez
Hey Timm,
I love PyMEL too and have been using it since 0.7 (don’t mean to be a “topper” :) ) but I’m not worried about it. Here is why.
Paul Molodowitch maintains PyMEL. here is what he said:
First of all, PyMEL will continue to be maintained as long as Luma exists and is using Maya, and I don’t see that changing in the near or distant future. PyMEL has a strong following because it fills the many gaps in Maya’s native python support, and the maya-python landscape in 2016 looks almost exactly as it did nearly a decade ago when PyMEL first came into existence, so the niche that it fills still exists. Studios continue to have 3 choices: use PyMEL, suffer with maya.cmds, or rewrite their own versions of PyMEL’s utilities.
It takes very little effort on Autodesk’s part to package PyMEL with Maya — far, far less than it would to actually make the bare minimum of changes to make PyMEL irrelevant. The API 2.0 overhaul is a good example of the glacial pace of change on this front (released in 2013, then stagnated, and still not complete in 2016). Their strategy for the past few years has been to buy plugins in lieu of in-depth custom development, and the inclusion of PyMEL was, and continues to be, in line with that strategy.
As for your developer’s comments, Autodesk has never taken a very active part in PyMEL, so it’s not a completely unfair characterization, but their general malaise has always existed and hasn’t gotten any worse. They communicate with us when they need a new drop, and just the other day they made a commit and pull request on github. Like you, I don’t really see them discontinuing something that is used by many of their customers and which takes almost no effort on their part to include.
I will be honest with you in saying that there are not any revolutionary changes planned for PyMEL. There’s simply not much changing on Autodesk’s end and therefore not much reason for us to innovate (we wrap their APIs, after all). Speed would be one area of improvement, but to get a big gain on the maya.cmds side we would need new hooks from Autodesk, and it’s not a feature that sells licenses. We’ve considered porting the API calls to 2.0, but it’s still unclear how much we would gain from such an overhaul or when there will be complete coverage of all the c++ classes.
So, basically, PyMEL is not going away (even in the event that Autodesk stopped including it as a site-package), and it’s still as solid a choice as it has always been for all the same reasons.
Marcus Ottosson
It’s as much of a risk as it is depending on anything open source, I suppose, and generally wouldn’t worry.
However..
will continue to be maintained as long as Luma exists and is using Maya
..I hope this is not true. Studios come and go and studios find new solutions to solve their needs every day. When Luma goes something pops up to replace their need for Maya, I’d expect a set of volunteers to step in and continue to maintain it and provide updates.
If not, then I’d worry.
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Chad Vernon
will continue to be maintained as long as Luma exists and is using Maya
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Timm Wagener
It’s as much of a risk as it is depending on anything open source, I suppose…
Sounds reasonable! But honestly I was thinking less about maintenance and such but more on legal consequences, guarantees etc….like some sort of (perceived)
warranty you might be having with an official API !?….don’t know for what and how, but it seems like basic business logic to operate the thing you bought for lots
of money according to manufactorer’s instructions to not lose any warranties/arguments!?
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Paul Molodowitch
It’s as much of a risk as it is depending on anything open source, I suppose…
Sounds reasonable! But honestly I was thinking less about maintenance and such but more on legal consequences, guarantees etc….like some sort of (perceived)
warranty you might be having with an official API !?….don’t know for what and how, but it seems like basic business logic to operate the thing you bought for lots
of money according to manufactorer’s instructions to not lose any warranties/arguments!?
will continue to be maintained as long as Luma exists and is using Maya
..I hope this is not true. Studios come and go and studios find new solutions to solve their needs every day. When Luma goes something pops up to replace their need for Maya, I’d expect a set of volunteers to step in and continue to maintain it and provide updates.
If not, then I’d worry.
Paul Molodowitch
...and before any conspiracy theories get started - the hanging "we would love to have..." statement was going to read, "we would love to have a wider base of core contributors", but I dropped it when I rewrote because... well, what open source project wouldn't, and it didn't really add any useful information to the discussion.
Chad Dombrova
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