"vcvarsall.bat" freezes on new 1809-based Windows images

Environments Windows
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For some reason, calling C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat seems to freeze 1809-based Windows builds.

Now on 1809: https://travis-ci.org/hpi-swa/graalsqueak/jobs/646198232#L104
Before on 1803: https://travis-ci.org/hpi-swa/graalsqueak/jobs/645394730#L104

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  • Are you sure the files that you try to run actually exist?

    Since it’s essentially a different system, need to rediscover what is available out of the box.

  • To debug a .bat file, you can replace @echo off at the start of it with @echo on.

    • Looking at the vcvarsall.bat on my system, you can also set VSCMD_DEBUG envvar to 3 to the same effect.
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I’m afraid this doesn’t really solve the problem.
vcvarsall.bat does exist, and I don’t seem to get any debug output when setting VSCMD_DEBUG=3 (see https://travis-ci.org/hpi-swa/graalsqueak/jobs/646488990#L64)

It looks like other projects are timing out because of this as well. Here’s an example:
https://travis-ci.org/tcltk/tcl/jobs/646432319#L35

Any idea what’s going on here?

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We’re seeing this exact error on hiredis builds (and all recent PRs).

I first noticed the failure in a PR so I started bisecting to find where it was introduced, but have now seen several previously passing builds fail in the same way.

Link to an example failure

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Same issue for me. Builds started to hang without any relevant changes in the project. Example job

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Okay, found it.

The behavior change happens when KB4534273 (a recent update for 1809) is installed.

Git Bash starts formatting the single-quoted part as a single argument (as it should) and treating /c as a path (as it usually does) – which it didn’t do before for some reason. So in fact, what you see now is the correct behavior.

As such, cmd /C '"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" amd64 && <etc>' turns into C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe C:/ "\"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat\" amd64 && <etc>" argument for CreateProcess.

Since Cmd, unlike Bash, expects the code on the command line to not be a single argument but multiple, one for each lexeme, you need to represent it accordingly as multiple arguments, quoting Bash special syntax as necessary (and also prevent treating /c as path):

cmd.exe //C 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat' amd64 '&&' <etc>
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