Today I discovered that changes have been made to the way Shelves are managed. It started when I discovered that Polygons_User, Animation_User, XGen_User shelves etc had errors in them. This is in 2017. I had not been using these shelves but one thing led to another and it dawned on me that something was not behaving as I expected.
To make a long story short... I've been through all my preference setups back to 2014, I've tried multiple configurations, and attempted to recreate the failing shelves and create a new shelf for a new task. Something has drastically changed in the way shelves are being run. After deleting my shelves and spending significant time attempting to recreate them I've discovered that some changes I make with commands that are supposed to be valid (in particular -style) are being reverted back to a standard setting without my knowledge.
Looking through forum posts and Google searches I'm seeing all sorts of complaints regarding shelves. After recreating some of the failing shelves I'm seeing big differences in command and other style structures between 2016 and 2017, and it is being made worse because some of the shelf settings from older preferences are being carried over when 2017 was installed.
Further, as others have already complained icon sizes are behaving unexpectedly and I'm struggling with labels for my own custom MEL scripts. I can't seem to set a size wide enough get my labels to show up as readable, I want them on the bottom of the shelf not over the icon, and I want enough horizontal room to be able to read my labels. I cant seem to affect any of these changes and some of the changes I make, such as -style, are being purposely removed by Maya once it is run.
Looking back it seems that some of this began with Maya 2016 but has gotten worse under 2017. And I'm wondering how much of this is having an impact on the OP's original complaint. I sympathize with his frustration. I've been using Maya since 1998 and this need to be constantly deleting preferences is as old as Maya itself. He has a valid point.
Having Backup preferences is not going to fix this problem. Cleaning things out every year or two is not going to help either. You have to completely erase and recreate all prefs with each new version just to minimize the problem and that's not a guarantee. The problem exists because Maya has this propensity to drag along older outdated, deprecated and invalid preference content because someone changed the way a command works or changed a UI behavior or setup in a new maya version but didn't mod the way the prefs handles this new stuff or check for it or clean it out. This has been ongoing for 2 decades. And then there is the issue of documentation. For example:
Looking at the shelfButton command reference for Maya 2017, it tells me I can use the following values for the -style setting:
"iconOnly", "textOnly", "iconAndTextHorizontal", "iconAndTextVertical", and "iconAndTextCentered".
But every time I change it to "iconAndTextVertical" Maya reverts it back to "iconOnly" in the MEL shelf script upon exit. Is the setting valid or has it been deprecated?
There's a brief explanation in the Maya 2016 What's New document that Shelves were updated. But since that time nothing is found in the Maya 2017 What's New docs and a search of AKN produces nothing of relevance when searching for shelfButton and style.
Can someone please explain what is going on here.
Joey
