Initializing Environments Fast
Initializing an environment may take few seconds and upwards based on many factors such as how many packages there are, whether the drive that contains the packages is fast enough, and intranet performs well, etc. This is because initializing an environment involves what we call “File IO” meaning that files, and folders needed to be read during the initialization. As you may know these type of operations might be slow in some cases for the reasons we just stated. In such cases Meco™ allows you to re-initialize the last initialized environment for a given request. Let’s see it with an example.
Say you are a modeller and initialized an environment by executing the following command to get your tasks done in Autodesk Maya.
# On Linux OS and Mac OS:
meco -p awesomeproject -a maya2020
# On Windows OS:
meco -p awesomeproject -a maya2020
When you are done with your tasks you can terminate the environment if you want to. You can use the following command
with -l, --last flag to re-initialize the environment that you initialized last time.
# On Linux OS and Mac OS:
meco -p awesomeproject -a maya2020 -l
# On Windows OS:
meco -p awesomeproject -a maya2020 -l
This time though, Meco™ will not read any folder or file to determine what needs to be initialized since the initialization data has already been stored in a file. Therefore, waiting time to initialize the environment will be considerable short.
Caveats
Since Meco™ uses last flag in order to initialize environments from what you can call a cached file, any update
on the packages (meaning tools, scripts, plug-ins, etc.), which might be done after you initialized an environment
will not be reflected to the environment when you initialize a new one with last flag.
Software development department of your company may implement a workflow to inform users and artists whether they should initialize environments without using last flag when needed.