ability to local_dir or local_dir_use_symlinks=False

[bolekcg]

Hello .
This one could be nice
Just download to specified path witout need to use .cache directory with pointers
All the best

[travisfinch1983]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this cache deal. Not everyone uses a huggingface cache based setup. I use it now, and it sends everything as blobs to the cache folder, then either errors out creating symlinks when it reaches 100%, and then I have nothing but blobs left over. Previous versions it would just download the files directly to a local folder I specified and it worked just fine. Using the huggingface cache setup should be an option to toggle, not the default mode. This seems like an added layer of complexity that might help some people, but not others, so it should be a user toggled function.

I just downloaded 150GB worth of models not realizing it was doing this until the very end when the downloads errored out after reaching 100%. I ended up with 150GB worth of blobs that I don't need. I need to rollback to a previous version, or download them by hand it seems.

[miversen33]

Hard agree. I used this to download models from hugging face in the same format as llama.cpp expects them. I can appreciate the caching idea but it seems this has completely busted the basic idea of "here is a model, download the gguf".

I have also notice that the basic (legacy) --models-dir does not seem to be respected. Which is, annoying.