Installation issues on Windows

[btbest]

Opening this issue primarily to document the problems I had during installation on Windows and how to get around them.

The problems were always with the step of installing napari-ilastik from ilastik-forge with either

• conda create -n napari-ilastik -c ilastik-forge napari-ilastik or
• conda install -c ilastik-forge napari-ilastik (while an empty new conda env was already activated)

I was trying to achieve this from the miniforge prompt.

Problem 1: Console outputs are very disorderly. I.e. parts of the console output may get reshuffled to earlier up in the window. See screenshot below for example. This led to errors not being reported at the end of the console output as one would expect.

Solution: Unfortunately none. But knowing that you have to scan the entire console output for hints regarding what might be going on can help. Whether you try to install packages directly in conda create or first create an empty env and then use conda install seems to make a difference though, so try both.

Problem 2: "Handle is invalid" error (or to be exact "Das Handle ist ungültig" as my system is German, and this error was apparently localised). This sounded to me like some package wasn't actually on ilastik-forge or conda-forge, but I checked that manually and it wasn't the case. I was only able to find out that this error wasn't actually from Python but from some Windows API.
Solution: I noticed I'm on an older mambaforge version. Uninstalled it and installed the most recent version.

Problem 3: Extracting a package failed. Detailed output:

yaml-0.2.5-h8ffe710_2.tar.bz2 extraction failed
error    libmamba Error when extracting package: remove: Zugriff verweigert: "C:\ProgramData\mambaforge\pkgs\yaml-0.2.5-h8ffe710_2\Library\bin\yaml.dll.conda_trash"

The localised "Zugriff verweigert" (German for "access denied") again hinted that this is an OS error; in this case I guessed the file for some reason required admin privileges to delete.
Solution: I ran conda clean -tipy. The problematic folder in \pkgs was left over since of course also the clean-command lacks admin privileges. I deleted the leftover folder manually and confirmed Windows' admin prompt when it popped up.