Maya: Texture hardlinks enabled (again) by default in Looks

[antirotor]

Bug

We've disabled creation of hardlink for textures by default in #995 but for some reason, this is not in place anymore.
Hardlinks are not very reliable in some scenarios because of opened handles, making them unusable mainly for Hero versions and so on.

Wheter to disable it directly in code, or enable force copy on look instance by default is matter of question.

Related to #879

[cuID:OP-2981]

[BigRoy]

Wheter to disable it directly in code, or enable force copy on look instance by default is matter of question.

If we would want to disable in code. Would we want to disable any hardlink feature whatsoever, or only for Looks?

Because the Integrate Hero Version also seems to do hardlinks by default. Which gets around most of the "file in use" issues on Windows due to the original file not getting renamed but the parent folder (version folder) as a backup.

[m-u-r-p-h-y]

I would suggest not to clutter the look instance with unnecessary attributes and just use the copy in the code.

In this case hardlinks are causing the issue with "file is used by another process" so it is interesting to read that in other cases it is helping to prevent similar issues.

[BigRoy]

I would suggest not to clutter the look instance with unnecessary attributes and just use the copy in the code.

Be aware that forceCopy is already an existing attribute on the Look instance.

[m-u-r-p-h-y]

removing it and forcing the copy should not create any issue (in case of texture publish)

I still think that hardlinks are actually creating the problem not preventing it. We need to fix this asap as the cases of broken texture publish are accumulating rapidly.

[BigRoy]

Is this still an ongoing issue currently @antirotor @m-u-r-p-h-y ?

[m-u-r-p-h-y]

I suppose it is fixed, but will double check with devs.

Thank you @BigRoy for going through the issues!

[m-u-r-p-h-y]

the thing is, with windows hardcoded force_copy = True (which we needed to fix a client issue)

we should now change it the way it is off by default but it could be overriden on the instance as we have the setting there

which does not work on windows now

[BigRoy]

So yes, on Windows the setting does nothing - but on UNIX it should work. With all the issues the feature had and the windows-compatibility being an issue we can also discuss whether the hardlinking feature is even worth it at all and maybe we'd want to remove it.

On the other hand, we might have others ways than hardlinking that could work for this feature, maybe? (No idea).

I'd recommend if we want to keep this particular issue open for resolving e.g. windows compatibility in the future or whatever we want to track is that we rename the Issue title and maybe update the initial comment of this issue to include some more information as to what is still to do.