Permissions issues with artifacts on Windows in 1.10-rc1 (and betas) - Access is denied

[nilshg]

This is a somewhat speculative issue without a reproducer - I'm filing this as I've run into this a few times now and have had sporadic interactions with people on Discourse/Slack seeing this as well, so hopefully this consolidates things by giving those who experience this issue something to search for.

What prompted me to file today was seeing this in one of my environments:

  64 dependencies successfully precompiled in 360 seconds. 266 already precompiled.
  1 dependency had output during precompilation:
┌ GR
│  ERROR: LoadError: InitError: could not load library "C:\Users\ngudat\.julia\artifacts\52bbefbea6a9098fa5c57208812d3868fac90841\bin\libxml2-2.dll"
│  Access is denied.
│  Stacktrace:
│    [1] dlopen(s::String, flags::UInt32; throw_error::Bool)
│      @ Base.Libc.Libdl .\libdl.jl:117

I had previously posted on Discourse about this here:

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/windows-artifact-issue-access-denied-when-installing-plots-makie/103734/4

with others chiming in reporting the same issue. There's also an issue reported with Yggdrasil here:

JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil#7625

All of this is a bit of a throwback to this old issue from 1.5 days:

#38411

(and again with what I've seen on 1.10 again starting Julia as admin was fine, but then required to always run as admin when wanting to use any packages loading artifacts).

If anything changed in how artifacts get handled on Windows it might be worth looking into. Equally if no one else chimes in here reporting any issues I might just be seeing a hangover effect from artifacts installed earlier and the problem is solved on rc1 already.

[nilshg]

This seems to have become more widespread?

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/access-denied-for-plotting-artifacts/110570/2

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/given-up-installing-any-plotting-packages/110272/24

[IanButterworth]

I believe this is the corresponding Pkg issue JuliaLang/Pkg.jl#3269

[giordano]

I believe this is the corresponding Pkg issue JuliaLang/Pkg.jl#3269

I'm not sure, the error reported here has been observed only on Windows and only on Julia v1.10+, the Pkg issue you linked is on Linux and it started already in Julia v1.8.

I feel like this may be related (again) to JuliaLang/Pkg.jl#3349

[nilshg]

Is there anything I can do to help with this? I'm currently not affected by the issue but - at risk of sounding annoying - this is the sort of issue that really puts off the typical corporate engineering/data science user that is usually on Windows and checking out Julia, only to find that they can't use any package that has an artifact somewhere in its dependency chain (which is almost surely at least one package for a new user).

I appreciate that the Venn diagram between "can contribute to Julia internals" and "uses Windows" is pretty much empty, but I'm happy to try out stuff if there is someone in the first part of the Venn diagram who has ideas about how this could be tackled.

[StefanKarpinski]

In the linked issue, @staticfloat wrote that this was happening because Pkg is installing things read-only. Do dlls need to be writeable on Windows or something?

[staticfloat]

Do dlls need to be writeable on Windows

I don't believe that's the case. Without some kind of reproducer it's going to be very difficult to track down what's happening here.

[ViralBShah]

Do any of these reproduce? They seem to have specific instances of failing packages.

JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil#7625
#53139

[IanButterworth]

Can we add a stat of the dll to the dlopen error message?