removeDirectoryRecursive failures on Windows

[sjakobi]

I've been encountering this issue in CI jobs for dhall-haskell (dhall-lang/dhall-haskell#2336). The failures look like this:

C:\Users\runneradmin\AppData\Local\Temp\stack-eadfc3912a464ffd\pretty-simple-4.0.0.0\.stack-work\dist\274b403a\setup: removeDirectoryRecursive:removeContentsRecursive:removePathRecursive:removeContentsRecursive:removePathRecursive:removeContentsRecursive:removePathRecursive:removeContentsRecursive:removePathRecursive:removeContentsRecursive:RemoveDirectory "\\\\?\\C:\\Users\\runneradmin\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\stack-eadfc3912a464ffd\\pretty-simple-4.0.0.0\\.stack-work\\dist\\274b403a\\setup": unsatisfied constraints (The directory is not empty.)

Similar failures were reported in haskell/cabal#7240. A fix was proposed for Win32 in haskell/win32#129, but rejected. Is this something that could be fixed in directory?!

[sjakobi]

I'm still getting these failures.

@Rufflewind What do you think about this issue?

[Rufflewind]

• Is this different from Recursively delete directories on Windows without race conditions #110?
• Do you have a CI script that can reproduce the issue with high probability?

[sjakobi]

• Is this different from Recursively delete directories on Windows without race conditions #110?

Thanks for the link to #110! If I understand the discussion there correctly, an implementation would fix this issue here. Feel free to close this issue as a duplicate.

Is there a rough ETA for an implementation of #110? Or should Cabal and stack maintainers wrap removeDirectoryRecursive in retry for now?

• Do you have a CI script that can reproduce the issue with high probability?

Unfortunately I don't. I've seen stack builds fail due to this issue from time to time, so I suspect that a script that repeats some stack install task will eventually fail.

[Rufflewind]

There's some ideas thrown around in #110 but I'm not aware of an easy fix on this issue. The lack of a reliable means reproduce this bug doesn't help.

The current known workaround is to retry on Windows. The number of retries may depend on the quantity of files you're deleting as well as the speed of the machine.

(Marked as dupe of #110)