Fix Windows bootstrap panic on invalid symlink removal (issue #143045)

[hasip-timurtas]

Fix Windows bootstrap panic on invalid symlink removal (issue #143045)

On Windows, use fs::remove_file for symlinks instead of fs::remove_dir to avoid error 267 when the symlink target is invalid. fs::remove_file can handle both file and directory symlinks/junctions, even when their targets don't exist.

r? @ghost

[rustbot]

r? @albertlarsan68

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[workingjubilee]

@hasip-timurtas Please make your PR description concise so your reviewer does not waste time reading it. It should only need to be about two sentences for a change of this size.

[workingjubilee]

Oh, your original commit message contains r? @ghost

That's something for guiding rustbot. You need to put it in your PR description for it to work. I can help, though, by unassigning your reviewer, since r? @ghost is for a PR that you do not intend to have reviewed.

[rustbot]

Failed to set assignee to ghost: invalid assignee

Note: Only org members with at least the repository "read" role, users with write permissions, or people who have commented on the PR may be assigned.

[hasip-timurtas]

@workingjubilee please check if it's ok now 🙂

[workingjubilee]

@hasip-timurtas Yes, that looks good to me. You may want to remove the r? @ghost from your commit message but a final decision there is up to the reviewer. Feel free to use r? again for your previous reviewer and to @rustbot ready.

[ChrisDenton]

The comment is incorrect and I also don't think the code is the correct fix. Both remove_file and remove_dir can remove symlinks. However, remove_dir can only remove directory symlinks.

[hasip-timurtas]

@ChrisDenton Thank you for the feedback

After digging into the Windows implementation, I found that fs::remove_file actually has special handling for this case. When it fails with ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED, it retries with FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT to handle the symlink directly (see library/std/src/sys/fs/windows.rs:1228-1235).

This is why it works on invalid symlinks - it doesn't try to follow them. fs::remove_dir doesn't have this fallback, which causes error 267.

Since fs::remove_file handles both file and directory symlinks on Windows, it's the right choice here. Happy to add a comment explaining this if you think it'd be helpful.