Is there any way to install nose in Maya?
Question: I'm using Autodesk Maya 2008 on Linux at home, and Maya 2012 on Windows 7 at
work. Most of my efforts so far have been focused on the former. I found [this
thread](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/639744/running-unit-tests-with-
nose-inside-a-python-environment-such-as-autodesk-maya), and managed to get
the setup there working at home. The gist of it is that you install nose for
whatever Python you have installed on your system, then create a py script
that adds that nose egg to sys.path, and loads in the maya.standalone module,
then imports nose and runs it. Then you run that py script through Maya's
version of Python (mayapy in the maya directory structure).

I'm unsure if running a Python 2.6 install of nose in Maya 2008's baked-in
Python 2.5 installation is of concern. Moreover, it's just a more messy setup,
and I'd like to do this for many coworkers. It would be nice to install nose
right into Maya 2008 (Python 2.5) and 2012 (Python 2.6).

To that end, I tried downloading nose and installing it via Maya's mayapy
executable:

    
    
    ~sudo /autodesk/maya2008-x64/bin/mayapy setup.py build
    running install
    error: invalid Python installation: unable to open /autodesk/maya2008-x64/lib/python2.5/config/Makefile (No such file or directory)
    

There's no config folder in there. Apparently this has to do with a missing
python-dev. I have that installed, but out in the system version of Python. I
don't know how to install it for Maya's Python, or if it's even possible. Is
it? Is Maya's version of Python too crazy/one-off to even consider this?


Answer: Since `nose` is a pure-Python package, it is safe to force it onto the
sys.path of Maya's built-in Python.

The worst that I believe could happen is some `*.pyc` thrashing if you use the
same `nose` installation with another 2.X version of Python. Over here, Maya
2011 and 2013 use Python 2.6.4 on OS X and Linux, so I just make sure to add a
version installed into a `python2.6/site-packages` directory.

This generally holds for compiled packages as well, enabling us to build
`PyQt4` for Maya as well.

I have been doing this without consequence for a few months now, even going so
far as to add it to the `sys.path` of a running Maya GUI in order to write
tests against the GUI!

