Build is failing with MSVC on GitHub Actions

[khaledhosny]

Describe the bug
After GitHub Actions recently updated their Windows virtual environment, builds starts failing when using MSVC as the .symbols generation step with error messages like the following that does not provide much details:

FAILED: subprojects/freetype/freetype-6.dll.p/freetype-6.dll.symbols 
"C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\Python\3.10.1\x64\Scripts\meson" "--internal" "symbolextractor" "D:\a\libraqm\libraqm\build" subprojects/freetype/freetype-6.dll "subprojects\freetype\freetype.lib" subprojects/freetype/freetype-6.dll.p/freetype-6.dll.symbols 

To Reproduce
Does not seem to be specific to a given project, I have at least two projects that now fail to build on GitHub Actions with MSVC, examples of failing builds:
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/runs/5083756125?check_suite_focus=true#step:6:1040
https://github.com/HOST-Oman/libraqm/runs/5083822595?check_suite_focus=true#step:10:101

Expected behavior
Builds to pass (which was the case before the GitHub Actions update).

system parameters
Ninja and meson versions do not seem to play a factor, I have seen it failing with various versions. The details CI setup can be seen in the links above.

[khaledhosny]

This might very well not be a meson bug, but it should at least give some useful error message, the failing symbolextractor does not seem to output any error messages.

[eli-schwartz]

This is a bug in pip. pypa/pip#10875

Meson cannot output error messages, because pip's generated executable has decided to make sys.stderr not exist, and symbolextractor errors out while trying to set up printing to stderr.

Downgrade and pin pip and it will work.

[khaledhosny]

Wow, thanks! I’ve been banging my head against the wall for days!

[eli-schwartz]

It is indeed a wonderfully non-obvious problem, yeah. Fingers crossed that pip can fix it soon...