Incompatible packages advice

[hughetop]

Hello,

I'm running into another issue with maya (big surprise) in that it's special PySide2 package is incompatible with the normal industry-standard PySide2 package. What I mean by that is: if you have a custom PySide2 tool and want to launch it within maya it must use maya's PySide2 package, otherwise it will crash. And conversely, if you try to launch it from a terminal, it must use the normal PySide2 package, not maya's PySide2.

Is there a good way to control the PySide2 import at runtime or is the recommendation to create 2 near-identical environments: one which requires maya, and another which requires PySide2?

platform-linux
os-centos-7.9.2009
arch-x86_64
maya-2022
PySide2-5.15.2.1

[hughetop]

Forgot to mention, another idea we had was to only require maya, but when launching from a terminal, patch the environment to include PySide2. I haven't played around with the rez python package, is there a clean way to do this with the rez python package? Something like a context manager ideally so that it doesn't modify the environment.

[maxnbk]

Ultimately, the "provides" feature is the solution to this. (discussed heavily elsewhere, but unimplemented)

Lacking that feature, the way I've seen this solved this in the past was to make the pyside-2 rez package have variants for maya, which, when resolved, point to mayas pyside stuff.

The downside is that sometimes you might want to ask for a vanilla pyside package, but receive a maya solve, which is subpar, and have to provide negations of !maya in requests in order to get the correct one. This has lead to a variety of unique situations, most of which are solvable, but it's definitely a subpar situation, and contributes to motivations to solve the unimplemented 'provides' feature.

[JeanChristopheMorinPerso]

@hughetop If you have control over your PySide2 package, you can always do something like:

def commands():
    if 'maya' not in request:
        env.PATH.append('<path to PySide>')

It's dirty but it works.

[hughetop]

We tried something similar, by prepending maya's PySide2 lib rather than append, so that it will always be found in the $PYTHONPATH first. That works fine when launching from within maya, but it crashes when launching from a terminal. At the moment, we basically can't reliably launch it from within maya and from a terminal in the same rez environment.

[maxnbk]

Are you using the correct python interpreter in each case?
If the maya pyside is prepended, you would only be able to use it when using mayapy rather than your vanilla python terminal, in that environment.

[hughetop]

OH! I will need to double check, but I'm pretty sure that's it. We were using mayapy in terminals for some reason, but switching to python should fix that.

[hughetop]

Well...you're mostly right, but apparently if vanilla PySide2 is in the environment at all, maya will crash. So PySide2 cannot be in the $PYTHONPATH if maya is launched. This seems to be an issue with maya, not rez or anything else. We've decided for now to just make 2 software environments, one with maya and another for the terminal.