By now you may have seen the announcements for Maya 2011. It's my pleasure to tell you that the rumors are true: PyMEL will be shipped with Maya, right alongside the maya python package. Those of you still sitting on the fence can now safely get off :)
PyMEL is still open source and will stay that way. the PyMEL team is responsible for delivering a stable version of PyMEL to Autodesk for each release, and PyMEL's unit test suite is now run as part of Maya's testing framework, so if Autodesk makes a change that break something, we'll all know about it. The version of PyMEL included with 2011 will be 1.0.0, but we will still be doing point releases that you can install over top of the pre-installed version in the usual ways. we actually have a 1.0.1 with fixes discovered since the 2011 code freeze that we'll release shortly. the current set of installation instructions should work across all versions, including 2011. those of you who have tested 1.0 now have some insight into why the installation became more complex: pymel 1.0 comes with modifications to the maya package that are now standard with 2011, but which need to be installed for prior versions of Maya. the official repo for PyMEL is now on github: http://github.com/LumaPictures/pymel git and github are a great way for various users and studios to collaborate on this project. if you go to "network" you can already see we have several users who have forked the pymel project and put in their own features and bug fixes, which we then review and pull in to the main repo (andrew, i'll get to yours soon, i swear!). I hope that you and your studio will do the same. the official homepage and issue tracker for PyMEL is still googlecode: http://code.google.com/p/pymel/ i know this isn't an academy award or anything, but i want to say thanks to all those who have aided in pymel's development -- Olivier Renouard, Ofer Koren, Paul Molodowitch, Ian Jones, and Andrew Gerard -- and to all the hard-core users out there who have been singing its praises, and also to the folks at Autodesk, especially John Creson and Chris Grebeldinger who have been cheering for PyMEL for awhile now. -chad -- http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya
