Invalid version string during Windows build

Internals & Design
1

I encountered the following error when trying to build Julia on Windows via Cygwin.

$ make -j8
...
    JULIA usr/lib/julia/sys.ji
...
error during bootstrap:
LoadError("sysimg.jl", 3, LoadError("Base.jl", 226, LoadError("version.jl", 245,
 ArgumentError("invalid version string: "))))
parse at .\version.jl:126 [inlined]

The relevant lines are here:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/7647ab574fba6460877d0c1c571a86fdf18b5d31/base/version.jl#L245-L251

I’ve already figured out the solution below, but I’m mainly posting in case anyone else encounters this issue.

2

As the lines in version.jl hint at, the issue has to do with libllvm_version_string.

In my case, I found the following in base/build.h:

const libllvm_version_string = ""

This indicates a failure of getting LLVM_CONFIG_HOST to run.
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/33cfcc44f23736346a8489399c1dd682cc6ba81f/base/Makefile#L68

Indeed, we see that llvm-config.exe (in the julia source tree) produces no output and silently fails.

$ cat VERSION
1.7.0-DEV

$ usr/tools/llvm-config.exe --version

$ echo $?
127

$ ldd usr/tools/llvm-config.exe
        ntdll.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll (0x7ffc5e420000)
        KERNEL32.DLL => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNEL32.DLL (0x7ffc5d010000)
        KERNELBASE.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNELBASE.dll (0x7ffc5b570000)
        msvcrt.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/msvcrt.dll (0x7ffc5cef0000)
        libstdc++-6.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/AppData/Local/Programs/Julia 1.5.0/bin/libstdc++-6.dll (0x6fc40000)
        LLVM.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/AppData/Local/Programs/Julia 1.5.0/bin/LLVM.dll (0x66740000)

The last two lines indicate that libstdc++-6.dll and LLVM.dll are getting dynamically linked from by Julia 1.5 install. This is because the Julia 1.5 installer added it to my Windows path:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/AppData/Local/Programs/Julia 1.5.0/bin

If we prepend usr/bin in the Julia repo to the path, then the results look much more reasonable.

$ PATH="usr/bin:$PATH" usr/tools/llvm-config.exe --version
11.0.0jl

$ PATH="usr/bin:$PATH" ldd usr/tools/llvm-config.exe
        ntdll.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll (0x7ffc5e420000)
        KERNEL32.DLL => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNEL32.DLL (0x7ffc5d010000)
        KERNELBASE.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNELBASE.dll (0x7ffc5b570000)
        msvcrt.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/msvcrt.dll (0x7ffc5cef0000)
        libstdc++-6.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/source/repos/julia/usr/bin/libstdc++-6.dll (0x6fc40000)
        LLVM.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/source/repos/julia/usr/bin/LLVM.dll (0x66740000)
        ADVAPI32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/ADVAPI32.dll (0x7ffc5e330000)
        sechost.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/sechost.dll (0x7ffc5ca20000)
        libgcc_s_seh-1.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/source/repos/julia/usr/bin/libgcc_s_seh-1.dll (0x61440000)
        libwinpthread-1.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/source/repos/julia/usr/bin/libwinpthread-1.dll (0x64940000)
        RPCRT4.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/RPCRT4.dll (0x7ffc5e1b0000)
        libgcc_s_seh-1.dll => /cygdrive/c/Users/kittisopikulm/source/repos/julia/usr/bin/libgcc_s_seh-1.dll (0x1460000)
        ole32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/ole32.dll (0x7ffc5cd90000)
        combase.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/combase.dll (0x7ffc5d5a0000)
        ucrtbase.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/ucrtbase.dll (0x7ffc5bc10000)
        bcryptPrimitives.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/bcryptPrimitives.dll (0x7ffc5b9c0000)
        GDI32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/GDI32.dll (0x7ffc5d500000)
        win32u.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/win32u.dll (0x7ffc5c4a0000)
        gdi32full.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/gdi32full.dll (0x7ffc5b820000)
        msvcp_win.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/msvcp_win.dll (0x7ffc5b3a0000)
        USER32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/USER32.dll (0x7ffc5d0d0000)
        SHELL32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/SHELL32.dll (0x7ffc5d9b0000)
        cfgmgr32.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/cfgmgr32.dll (0x7ffc5b440000)
        shcore.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/shcore.dll (0x7ffc5e0a0000)
        windows.storage.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/windows.storage.dll (0x7ffc5bd10000)
        profapi.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/profapi.dll (0x7ffc5b370000)
        powrprof.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/powrprof.dll (0x7ffc5b320000)
        UMPDC.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/UMPDC.dll (0x7ffc5b2d0000)
        shlwapi.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/shlwapi.dll (0x7ffc5e150000)
        kernel.appcore.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/kernel.appcore.dll (0x7ffc5b2e0000)
        cryptsp.dll => /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/cryptsp.dll (0x7ffc5baa0000)

The short term fix is to remove any Julia bin directories from your PATH. The long term fix is to have the Makefile prepend rather than append the usr/bin path as I detailed in

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/39275.

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