Pretrained.from_hparams() failing on windows when non admin

[gfournier]

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.

[gfournier]

EDIT: it works well for following configuration as a workround, I let you decide if you need a better solution :)

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

[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.

[gfournier]

I found a new one with latest version 0.5.11:
https://github.com/speechbrain/speechbrain/blame/9d56d50809d8745cc7dafa930aec554145be4028/speechbrain/pretrained/interfaces.py#L281

A fetch of a custom.py file has been introduced and a symlink is created if the file is missing.
This customization cannot be bypassed by passing None for example.

[Gastron]

Ooh that is just a bug in how local sources are handled!

[padmalcom]

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

[Adel-Moumen]

Hello,

Any news on this issue please?

Thanks.

[tomwagstaff-opml]

I'd also be interested in an update. There are quite a few of us Windows users out there without admin rights 😅

Even some further explanation / documentation of the workarounds would be useful, although in my case I'm using a package that depends on speechbrain so I can't implement any workarounds directly.