macOS "failed to create installation symlink"

[keith]

We see this flake occasionally on macOS:

FATAL: failed to create installation symlink '/private/var/tmp/_bazel_iosci/4988be46b65c576ca5906aacc315f576/install': (error: 2): No such file or directory

Bugs: what's the simplest, easiest way to reproduce this bug? Please provide a minimal example if possible.

It's unclear how to repro this since it's quite flaky, but we see it at least once per day in our CI infra.

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

macOS

What's the output of bazel info release?

3.4.1

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

https://github.com/bazelbuild/continuous-integration/issues/197

[keith]

Maybe we could do some extra retrying here?

[philwo]

I haven't seen this on our CI in months, IIRC, so closing as obsolete.

Please report back if you still see this happen with the latest Bazel version.

[keith]

We still see this with 4.0.0:

FATAL: failed to create installation symlink '/private/var/tmp/b/e7bd72a701bd567d022e9a94d948a6f2/install': (error: 2): No such file or directory

[keith]

I actually reproduced this today with 6.0.0-pre.20220630.1, I haven't tried to see if it's reliable, but in 1 terminal I did a bazel clean --expunge, and in a second terminal I ran a command that naturally waited on the clean to finish. When the clean finished I immediately got this error. To me that makes it sound like by the time bazel is waiting it's assuming the installation directory structure is configured, so when it gets deleted elsewhere while bazel is waiting, it won't get re-created.