Here is a situation I am trying to understand.

Bob creates an otl in their home directory, Jan loads user Bob's scene, but Bob's otl is not on Jan's HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH

When Jan tries to load Bob's scene she will get a load error because the otl definition is incomplete (not found). If Jan installs the asset library manually, next time she loads her scene it finds the otl no problem.

The HDK documentation states that if a user installs an OTL which is not in the scan path houdini will write an .OPlibrary CPIO packet that lists the otl file being installed. When houdini reopens, it now knows which additional otl files to load. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/hdk/_h_d_k__h_d_a_intro.html#HDK_HDAIntro_Management_Meta [www.sidefx.com]

I would like to know where this OPlbirary CPIO data lives so I can decide how to handle the situation above.

Pretty sure it lives in your hip file. If you open a fresh session, you won't see the installed OTL anymore. (Unless you are using OPlibraries style management, which is not the default. Otl scan path is the default sourcing style)

Yea that's what I thought, but it doesn't appear so… I realized I'm missing some information in my example above.

Bob creates an OTL and has it installed in his saved scene.

Jan tries to open Bob's scene but cannot find the OTL. If Jan installs the OTL herself, then next time she loads the scene its fine.

If the OPLibrary data was saved in the original scene Jan wouldn't have an issue loading it.

Ok I found what is causing our issue. We have a /home path for users home directories, which is actually a symlink to another path on the network. Our houdini configuration is using /home/user by default (set with HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR). If a user installs an otl with this path, rather than the resolved symlink, then for some reason other people have an issue loading it.

Jeff Wagner's recent webinar “Houdini Pipeline Best Practices” offers some suggestions that anyone working in such a multi-user environment may find helpful:

https://vimeo.com/243231727 [vimeo.com]