Pretrained.from_hparams() failing on windows when non admin

The following code is failing on windows with non-admin rights (not a big issue but sadly a “standard” case in lots of “big” companies) due to symlinks.

EncoderClassifier.from_hparams(
  source=r"C:\path\to\pretrained\model",
  savedir="./tmp",
  overrides={"pretrained_path": r"C:\path\to\pretrained\model"})

I fixed it locally by copying models to savedir instead of making a symlink (fetching.py:L102), BUT I will not submit it as a fix.

try:
  destination.symlink_to(sourcepath)
except:
  import shutil
  shutil.copyfile(sourcepath, destination)

I can start working on local loading feature in a PR if you’re interested. When loading from local, we could even avoid copying or symlinking directories and loading directly from the local folder for example.

[Gastron]

Yes, this is a known issue, see for instance #893. Thanks for a new workaround idea! At the moment we don’t plan to change this implementation just for Windows users who cannot run with the right permissions. However, this might get solved as a side product if we decide to move away from symlinks to real copies - which seems to be behaviour that multiple users expect.

[padmalcom]

FYI this issue still exists for Tacotron2.from_hparams on Windows.