I know that pip installing is a bit less convenient

Just adding my two cents to this on how it is not just a bit less
convenient, but a complete killer in some cases; the cases that are most
important from my perspective. Namely, external tools development. Take
mGear for example. A general purpose auto rigging solution built on PyMEL.
Their potential userbase went from all Maya users to the few who are
capable of using pip. From riggers to riggers with scripting and pipeline
experience. A tiny fraction of what it used to be. As a result, they will
likely need to move away from PyMEL to regain their audience. And in my
case, had I built Ragdoll Dynamics on PyMEL, I would not only had lost
userbase, but the vast majority of revenue for my business. My audience
isn’t even riggers, but animators. An audience that is not expected to know
anything about pip or even Python. And certainly would not be able to do
pull-through caching on Nexus or Artifactory.

I have great respect and appreciation for PyMEL; it’s how I personally went
from learning Python with maya.cmds to object-oriented thinking and API
design. But it’s now in the tough position of drawing a crowd of Python
beginners who is now also expected to know the down and dirty of Python and
package management. Not to mention that their audience will now have an
unpredictable version of PyMEL installed their users system, and having to
account for the differences in their own tools.

A possible solution that I’d recommend is making PyMEL vendorable.
Something tools developers can embed into their project such that (1) the
end-user won’t need to install anything and (2) the version developed
against remain consistent with the tool. For a project like PyMEL, I’d
imagine this to be a tall order. But unless something is done, pip
installing isn’t merely less convenient, but a PyMEL killer, IMO.

On Fri, 7 Apr 2023 at 16:22, Chad Dombrova <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> PyMEL 1.3.0 has been released to PyPI. Those of you paying attention to
> recent releases of Maya may have noticed that PyMEL is no longer
> distributed with Maya. The new approach is to use pip to install PyMEL
> from PyPI, and you can find instructions on how to do this on the PyMEL
> PyPI page <https://pypi.org/project/pymel/> (as well as github).
>
> I know that pip installing is a bit less convenient, but on the bright
> side distributing via PyPI will give us the ability to make patch releases
> as needed. If access to PyPI is not available in your working environment
> due to restricted internet, I highly recommend getting your IT team to set
> up an internal mirror that can do pull-through caching, like Nexus
> <https://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus-repository> or Artifactory
> <https://jfrog.com/artifactory-book-demo/>, both of which have free
> versions.
>
> On to the release. There are two big improvements in 1.3.0:
>
>    1. support for Maya 2023 and fixes for 2022 in python3 mode
>    2. very accurate stubs for code completion and static analysis,
>    distributed as PEP 561 <https://peps.python.org/pep-0561/>-compliant
>    pyi files.
>
> The second feature means if you use an editor that understands pyi stubs,
> like PyCharm and VS Code with Pylance
> <https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-python.vscode-pylance>,
> you should begin to see immediate improvements just by pip installing pymel
> into a virtual env that your editor knows about.
>
> *I wrote a blog post about the stubs* if you’re interested:
> https://dev.to/chadrik/pymels-new-type-stubs-2die
>
> The new stubs include arguments and their types for nearly all functions
> in pymel, as well as many return types and even many return types that
> are conditional based on input arguments.
>
> I know that this release has been a long time coming.  Finding the time to
> put together this announcement added some delays (I’m currently writing
> this while on vacation), so I apologize to those of you who have been
> waiting. And yes, we’ll get started on Maya 2024 soon.
>
> -chad
>
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