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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to python_inside_maya+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/CABPXW4gxzoJLTXrX_0VA%3DXrXDpNwfONGE_Cc5V6d%2BSALNcrFpg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
